Omega 37 (2009) 615–623www.elsevier.com/locate/omega

Ackoff’s Fables revisited: stories to inform operationalresearch practice�

Jonathan H. Klein∗

Centre for Narrative Studies, School of Management, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK

Received 30 October 2006; accepted 29 February 2008Available online 8 March 2008

Abstract

This paper considers Ackoff’s Fables, a set of short stories published by Ackoff in 1978 as guides to creative problem solving.The paper argues that storytelling of this kind contributes usefully to management and MS/OR education, before addressing howsuch Fables might be interpreted. It is demonstrated, using one of Ackoff’s Fables, The Smart Jackass, for illustrative purposes,that interpretation of even apparently straightforward stories such as these is not unambiguous. The Fables can be interpretedin a multitude of different and sometimes contradictory ways, and the truths they might contain are not self-evident. Yet, as thebasis for discussion, they still have much to offer as educational tools. The paper concludes with a discussion of literal truth instories, and presents a classification of story types according to their relationship to literal truth.� 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: OR education; History of OR

1. Introduction

Russell Ackoff published The Art of Problem Solvingin 1978 [1]. He described it as “neither a textbook, nora handbook, nor a learned treatise”, but rather “what isleft from sifting through 30 years of experience. . . insearch of clues on how to make problem solving morecreative and more fun” (p. x). Scattered throughout thebook are 35 short tales, collectively known as Ackoff’sFables, most of them based on the author’s first-handexperience, but presented in fictionalised form. How-ever, Ackoff insists that the form and possible inac-curacy of his accounts “in no way detracts from theirusefulness as examples of the principles” (p. 17) of

� This manuscript was processed by Area Editor B. Lev.∗ Tel.: +44 23 80592554.

E-mail address: J.H.Klein@soton.ac.uk.

0305-0483/$ - see front matter � 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.omega.2008.02.006

creative problem solving. The Fables have acquiredsomething approaching legendary status within themanagement science and operational research (MS/OR)community, though, as is perhaps the case with manylegends, the number of people who have heard of themseems to be far greater than the number who can claimto be familiar with them.

Ackoff’s Fables are a near-perfect example of storiesbeing used in an educational context. The purposes ofrevisiting the Fables in this paper are twofold. First ofall, the paper attempts to evaluate the extent to whichthe Fables might still be relevant in, and what they mightbring to, MS/OR education. Secondly, the paper ex-plores issues concerned with the use of storytelling asan educational tool, considering these issues specificallywithin the context of MS/OR. The issues addressed arethe effectiveness of stories as educational tools, and theinterpretation of such stories.

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The paper is structured as follows. In the next section,a brief synopsis of The Art of Problem Solving is pro-vided, with particular attention given to the Fables. Thisis followed by a section which reviews the role of sto-rytelling in education, and makes specific reference toMS/OR education. The following section is concernedwith the interpretation of the Fables, and focuses, for il-lustrative purposes, on one particular Fable: The SmartJackass. The paper concludes with some remarks on theliteral truth of stories, and offers a classification of storytypes according to their relationship to literal truth.

2. T he Art of Problem Solving and Ackoff’sFables

The Art of Problem Solving was published in 1978.By then, Ackoff had already attained the status withinthe MS/OR community of a distinguished founder:as Kirby and Rosenhead [2], in their summary ofAckoff’s career, observe, “his influence on the early de-velopment of the discipline in the USA and in Britain inthe 1950s and 1960s is hard to over-estimate” (p. 130).Publication of The Art of Problem Solving more or lesscoincided with the airing of his “scathing attack on theOR community in general, but with a particular con-demnation of OR in practice and of academia in NorthAmerica” (p. 132), published in the Journal of theOperational Research Society in 1979 [3,4]. This at-tack is regarded by many as the start of the “soft” ORmovement in the UK. However, in the USA it appar-ently resulted in Ackoff’s being, in effect, “written outof the official OR canon” [2, p. 133], and echoes of itstill resound today (see, for example, Kaplan’s 2008paper on the application of OR to community problems[5]). In contrast, elsewhere in the world, and withinthe systems community in particular, Ackoff’s workremains highly regarded and influential. Conway [6],in a brief review in the Journal of the Operational Re-search Society, describes The Art of Problem Solvingas “a fun book with serious content” (p. 363), whileBrowning [7], in the Accounting Review, characterisesthe Fables as “unusually illuminating” (p. 457). Eilon’sreview in Omega [8], is more lengthy (running to 11pages) and considered: though broadly complimentary,Eilon clearly has reservations about the use of storiesas educational tools.

The Art of Problem Solving is divided into two mainsections: part one is entitled The Art, while part twois concerned with Applications. From an early 21stcentury standpoint, the second part has aged, perhapsnot surprisingly, less well than the first. Material whichmust have seemed fairly radical and forward thinking a

Fable 3.13. THE SMART JACKASS

A team of faculty members and students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico were working with a group of “backward” farmers in a very underdeveloped part of Mexico. They were trying to encourage these “campesinos” to improve themselves and their lot. The academics made themselves available as resources to be used by the campesinos as they saw fit.

The campesinos were very responsive and decided to try to irrigate their fields by digging a large ditch from a water source to the fields and smaller ditches to distribute the water over the fields. To do this they needed to determine level paths over their hilly fields. The academics said they could help by getting some surveying equipment from the university.

The campesinos told them this would not be necessary. They told the academics that if a burro is held at one point and something he wants and can see is placed at another point, if left free he will take a level path from origin to destination. The academics were sceptical and got their equipment anyhow. They tested the burro and found it to be as good as they were.

MORAL: The easiest way to do something is often learned the hard way.

Fig. 1. The Fable of The Smart Jackass (Fable 3.13, reproducedfrom [1, p. 73].

quarter of a century ago now looks a little bit naïveand commonplace, though that is not to say thatAckoff’s discussions, of, for example, urban trans-portation or the motivation for alcohol consumption,have nothing of value to offer a contemporary audi-ence. However, the five chapters which constitute TheArt, in which all except one of the Fables are to befound, have fared much better over time. Technologiesmay change, but the art of problem solving seems tobe fairly timeless, and these chapters appear to providea clear and well-structured articulation of it which hasstill much to offer MS/OR students, and others besides.

The five chapters address, respectively: creativityand constraints, objectives, controlled variables, uncon-trolled variables, and relations. Into these chapters ispacked a wealth of discussion and advice set out clearlyand succinctly. Much of their content is presented inthe form of history, anecdote and example—and, ofcourse, the Fables. Ackoff explains that these Fablesmay be treated as fictional, though most are basedon first-hand experience. They take the form of shortstories about organisational problem solving, and eachgenerally possesses some twist which makes it bothinteresting and memorable. By way of example, Fig. 1reproduces The Smart Jackass (Fable 3.13). Each Fableconcludes with a moral. Sometimes, it has to be said,these morals offer amusement rather than illumination.What is one supposed to make of the moral to A FishyStory (Fable 3.1), that “one is often moved deeply byanother’s hunger” (p. 53), for example? It has little todo with the point of the story (though it has plenty to do

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with the content), which “illustrates how simplifying aproblem can make it more difficult to solve” (p. 53).The moral to An Ups-And-Downs Story (Fable 3.2),that “with reflection it becomes apparent that there ismore than one way to look at the problem” (p. 54), israther clearer, whether or not one is aware that mirrorsplay a key part in the tale.

The Fables are set, of course, in the world of the1970s, and that imparts to them a quaintness whichmay detract from their immediacy. Things were dif-ferent then: information technology was, by currentstandards, primitive; there was an underlying andseldom-questioned modernist confidence in the benefitsthat science and its application (such as embodied inMS/OR) could and ultimately would provide; and theeveryday concerns of people were not quite the same.All these differences are reflected in the Fables—inthe stories themselves, and sometimes in the languageused to tell them. Nevertheless, if the reader can putthese effects to one side, the Fables still seem to workwell as stories about creative problem solving. It ispossible that the more mature reader may find it easierto do this—effectively thinking himself or herself backto the 1970s—than the younger.

Notwithstanding the favourable impressions that theFables can undoubtedly convey upon fairly casual read-ing, two questions may arise in the mind of the readerwho chooses to reflect upon them. The first question is:is storytelling of this kind an appropriate way to addressthe provision of knowledge of a topic such as creativeproblem solving? The second, related, question is: dothe Fables work?

3. Storytelling as an educational tool

The question of whether or not stories are an appro-priate medium for providing knowledge—whether ornot they are legitimate education tools—is quite possi-bly something of a straw man, since the reflection of amoment reminds us that stories are commonplace edu-cational devices. Davenport and Prusak [9] cite evidencefor their simple contention that “human beings learnbest from stories” (p. 81). Jackson [10], discussing nar-rative in teaching, observes that “there is probably not asingle school subject in which stories play no part at all.For even when the material being taught is not itself astory, the lesson usually includes a number of narrativesegments all the same. These take the form of jokes, rec-ollections, testimony, anecdotes, illustrations, examplesand more. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a lesson totallydevoid of narrative in one form or another” (p. 3). Jack-son sees stories as fulfilling two functions in education.

The epistemological function of stories is to inform:they either contain knowledge we wish to impart to stu-dents, or “they are themselves the knowledge we wantstudents to possess” (p. 5). The transformative functionof stories is; however, to transform: transformative sto-ries go beyond informing, and change their listeners orreaders “in ways that have relatively little to do withknowledge per se” (p. 9). Jackson regards the Fable as atransformative story form: a story intended to support amoral message. Bettelheim [11] echoes this view of Fa-bles, underlining their normative quality: “Fables. . . tellby means of words, actions or events—fabulous thoughthese may be—what one ought to do” (p. 27). Whetheror not Ackoff’s Fables can be strictly characterised asmorality tales is arguable. Use of the term Fable (whichwas suggested by one of Ackoff’s students) is proba-bly intended metaphorically—but it is quite an appo-site metaphor. Ackoff contends that “to make problemsolving creative. . . is to reunite work, play, and learningand therefore to reunify man, at least in his problem-solving activities” (p. 17). Ackoff wishes to transformrather than just inform.

How do stories fulfil their epistemological and trans-formative functions? Bruner [12] argues that there aretwo complementary but distinct modes of human cog-nitive functioning: the paradigmatic and the narrative.The former “attempts to fulfil the ideal of a formal,mathematical system of description and explanation”(p. 12), while the narrative mode uses the mechanismsof story structure to weave content together into a co-herent whole. The narrative mode is strongly associ-ated with “psychic reality” (p. 14); according to Bruner,narrative constitutes “one of the most ubiquitous andpowerful discourse forms in human communication”(p. 77), while Gabriel [13] observes that “turning factsinto stories is a distinctly human activity, as is listen-ing to stories, reconstructing them, embellishing them,and censoring them” (p. 858). Thus, stories representa natural and pervasive form of thinking, communi-cating and learning. The narrative structure of a storyserves to organise its content, so that it ceases to be acollection of unrelated chunks of information or data,but has the potential to be integrated knowledge (see,for example, Gudmundsdottir, [14]). The memorabilityof good stories is a particularly important quality (see,for example, Gabriel [15]), as is their persuasiveness(see, for example, [16]). Orr [17] draws attention tothe role that stories play in assisting people in makingsense of their experiences, and in conveying these ex-periences to others. Storytelling is particularly valuablefor sharing tacit knowledge [9]; Choo [18] associatesstorytelling with the externalisation mode of Nonaka

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and Takeuchi’s [19] spiral of organisational knowledgecreation. According to Weick and Roberts [20], “sto-ries organise know-how, tacit knowledge, nuance, se-quence, multiple causation, means-end relations, andconsequences into a memorable plot” (p. 368). (Note,however, that Wilson [21] argues that the term tacitknowledge is often used to describe both knowledgethat is truly tacit—inexpressible—and implicit knowl-edge, which is “previously unexpressed but expressible”(p. 19), and that, if this distinction is accepted, it is notentirely clear to which type of knowledge the above au-thors are referring.)

It would, therefore, be hard to argue a general caseagainst using storytelling as an educational tool inMS/OR. Indeed, the value of stories in MS/OR as em-bodied in case studies is celebrated: their submission toacademic journals is encouraged by editors, and theiruse as teaching aids is widespread (see, also, Eilon’scomments on the value of case studies [8]). To be sure,case studies are usually rather different in content andstyle to Ackoff’s Fables: case studies tend to be length-ier and more detailed than the Fables, and to lack their“moral” dimension. As well as case studies, patentlyfictional tales, too, have occasionally found their placein MS/OR discourse: The Goal [22] works both as anovel and as an exposition of principles of productionmanagement, as well as an exploration of the rela-tionship between the working and private lives of amanager. It would, however, be incorrect to suggestthat storytelling in MS/OR is entirely non-contentious:Eilon [8], for example, in his review of The Art ofProblem Solving, remarks that storytelling is “so allur-ing, yet so deficient. It encapsulates the frustrations andtriumphs of the storyteller in a most captivating way,but the inevitable process of simplification that hastaken place in order to isolate the grain from the chaffleaves many questions unanswered, particularly ques-tions about alternative approaches and the effectivenessof other possible solutions” (p. 99).

Storytelling as a tool for management educationand training is more widespread beyond the confinesof MS/OR. Stories such as Fish! [23], Who MovedMy Cheese? [24] and Squirrel Inc. [25] have achievedsome degree of notoriety, while there are many manualsavailable that address the use of stories in managementeducation and training contexts. For example, bothSimmons [26] and Parkin [27] provide useful guid-ance on how to tell stories, (the latter is less extensive,but provides a collection of 50 short stories), whileDenning’s aforementioned Squirrel Inc. is a story aboutthe use and value of seven different types of story: “afable of leadership through storytelling”.

4. Interpreting Ackoff’s Fables

Having established the general legitimacy ofAckoff’s Fables as an educational tool in MS/OR, weturn to a potentially more contentious question: howmay the Fables be interpreted and understood, and isthis interpretation and understanding appropriate toMS/OR as it is practiced in the first decade of the21st century? To introduce this discussion, we considerthe interpretation of The Smart Jackass (Fable 3.13),reproduced in Fig. 1.

The Smart Jackass is a straightforward story, but nev-ertheless is open to interpretation at a number of levelsand in a number of ways. At the superficial level, it canbe taken simply at face value. At this level, the mes-sage of the story might be that when there is a need todetermine level routes over hilly terrain, and a donkeyis conveniently to hand, then one can employ the don-key in the manner described in the story. This seems alegitimate interpretation, though we might surmise thatin the context of a book on problem solving it is un-likely to be the intent of the author. Ackoff probablyhas a more general message in mind. Some deeper in-terpretations seem more likely than others. Generalisingthe Fable to cover its applicability to any member ofthe horse genus is unlikely to be Ackoff’s point either.The context leads us in the direction of generalisationsabout problem solving processes.

However, interpretation at a deeper level is notquite as straightforward as one might imagine—thereare a number of interpretations that can quite easilybe reached, and not all of them seem likely to bewhat Ackoff intended. First of all, the story could beseen as a cautionary tale concerning officially sanc-tioned experts: their expertise may not be superior,and may even be inferior in some respects (such asconvenience or cost, for example), to the knowledgeof experienced clients. Many MS/OR practitioners,particularly but by no means exclusively from the“softer” side, would be glad to endorse this les-son, and it seems to have some correspondence tothe moral that Ackoff himself draws, that “the eas-iest way to do something is often learned the hardway” (for reasons outlined earlier in this paper, weshould assume that the stated moral is not necessar-ily the definitive lesson of the tale, and that its maintask is to provide a concluding flourish). One mightread into Ackoff’s moral as well, however, the im-plication that the academic experts would have savedthemselves much trouble if they had not doubtedthe farmers’ wisdom, and had not bothered to testand compare the two methods. Or, perhaps, the real

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point of the story is that the test and comparison wasnecessary to establish the better method (or, as in thiscase, their equivalence): the academics were right notto take the farmers on trust, and the farmers were,perhaps, rather arrogant in assuming that their ownmethod was effective.

Other messages might be received from the story.We may note that the practical contribution of the aca-demics to the irrigation project was apparently nil; canthis not be read to indicate that academic expertise has,in general, nothing to offer? But the project was initi-ated as a result of an offer of help from the academics,so perhaps their real contribution was facilitative andcatalytic rather than practical. The story could also beinterpreted, by one so minded, as a demonstration of thelack of superiority of modern technology (as wieldedby the academics) in comparison to the practical knowl-edge of the farmers.

The story depicts the farmers as unsophisticated: theywere “backward”, living in an “underdeveloped” land,and needed encouragement “to improve themselves andtheir lot”—a possible implication that they had not theinitiative to seek such improvement themselves. Theplacing of backward in inverted commas is interesting.This can be read as suggesting that the farmers gavethe appearance of ignorance, but knew more than wasapparent at first (a reading that might gain reinforce-ment from the oxymoronic title of the Fable). How-ever, the farmers’ knowledge was not of an academictype—it was rooted in their daily lives and experience,presumably handed down through generations—“folkwisdom” of a quasi-mystic kind. Similar themes arisein other Fables. In Spit is a Natural Resource (Fable3.14) the owner of the practical knowledge is the oldman who operates a furnace without sophisticated tech-nology. Differences in perspective between experts andothers are a recurring theme in the Fables. In Well ReadCan Well Mean Dead (Fable 2.4) experts had failed tosolve a problem of child illiteracy in a black ghetto,but a solution began to be developed when the premisethat “the children were rational and therefore that theexperts were not” (p. 35) was adopted. (Experts do notalways get a bad press in the Fables, though: frequentlythey are portrayed as quite smart, especially when con-trasted with managers.)

The above analysis of The Smart Jackass is notexhaustive. Other readers will almost certainly findother interpretations, overtones and suggestions withinAckoff’s text. Some may lament the way in which asingle correct interpretation appears to have evapo-rated from the Fable upon close inspection: the pos-sibility of knowing Ackoff’s intended interpretation

seems to have disappeared, and confusion, rather thanclarification, threatens. However, others might arguethat the extent to which Ackoff intended the variousinterpretations of the story is largely irrelevant. Truexet al. [28] characterise a postmodernist stance as onein which “text is defined by the act of being read orobserved, rather than in being authored” (p. 55), andin which “what an author meant to say is immaterialbecause it is never recoverable” (p. 75). What mattersis that multiple interpretations are there for the asking.How an individual interprets even such a straightfor-ward text as The Smart Jackass depends on context,including the nature of the individual himself or herself,and the nature of the interpretive instruments that the in-dividual brings to bear upon it. The field of literary the-ory (see, for example [29]) offers many complementarytheoretical lenses through which such analysis can beconducted.

One such lens is that of deconstruction, an approachthe value of which to MS/OR practitioners has beendemonstrated [30,31]; Beath and Orlikowski [32] pro-vide a clear and jargon-free account of deconstruction,including a set of analytic deconstruction strategies.Kilduff [33] has applied deconstruction to March andSimon’s Organizations [34], revealing within this much-cited and highly-revered classic of academic manage-ment literature “a simultaneous rejection and acceptanceof the tradition the authors sought to surpass” [33, p.14]. The distinction, discussed above, between expertsand non-experts that appears in The Smart Jackass andother Fables seems particularly open to exploration us-ing deconstructive strategies, and is reminiscent of thedistinction between information systems users and an-alysts that Beath and Orlikowski deconstruct in theirexamination of an information systems developmenttext [32].

Deconstruction is a central strategy of postmod-ernism. Taket and White [35], describing postmod-ernism as it might apply within the context of MS/OR,emphasise the importance of “the admittance of plu-rality, of relativism. . . the celebration of the polyvocal,polyvalent. . . the opening up of different perspectives,different stories” in providing “powerful lessons forpractice and reflection on practice” (p. 879–880). Inpostmodernism, this pluralism is an end in itself; post-modernism rejects the modernist ideas of absolute truthand progress based upon rational thought and analysis,which might, for example, take the form of movementtowards negotiated consensus. The influence, if not thewholesale adoption, of postmodernism can be seen incontemporary MS/OR practice, such as, for example,White and Bourne’s [36] use of problem structuring

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methods to support the participation of the public ina public policy development process, in which “dif-ferences, rather than similarities, in value priorities”(p. 601) were emphasised.

Ackoff, despite his use of an approach that encour-ages pluralism, is probably happy to be labelled, asTaket and White [35] implicitly label him, a modernist.Nevertheless, a sympathetic reading of Ackoff’s textcould suggest that he has deliberately sought to includethe ambiguities and interpretations that deconstructionmight reveal, maybe because he is writing at a “literary”level rather than in “text-book” style. Such considera-tions would not concern a strict deconstructionist, forwhom it is the reading of the text that is all-important,and for whom the intentions of its writer are neitherhere nor there. For those who do not approach the textin this spirit, however, Ackoff’s intent is important: theywould want to understand his message, and then ac-cept or reject it to the extent that it seems to warrant.Ackoff’s explicit aim in The Art Of Problem Solving,and particularly in his Fables, is to illustrate the princi-ples of creative problem solving—to the extent that heis aware of the ambiguities in his text, he might imag-ine that the thoughtful reader will use rational reflectionupon these ambiguities to see his or her way throughto these deeper truths. The reader must take on trustAckoff’s integrity in the way he has chosen to presenthis material, and the extent to which he has manipulatedit to serve his ends; as noted earlier, different commu-nities have made different judgements concerning hisperspective of MS/OR.

Even within the fairly narrow confines of an MS/ORstudent encountering Ackoff’s Fables in the course ofan educational process, different interpretations are pos-sible, and these will carry different messages aboutMS/OR. It may be concluded, therefore, that it is dan-gerous to use the Fables lightly, as simple stories themeanings of which are self-evident and uncontroversial.They are anything but that. However, as the basis fordiscussions of the practice of MS/OR and the valuesunderlying such practice, they offer a worthwhile, andperhaps rather under-recognised, contribution.

5. Truth and Fable

We conclude this paper by considering the issue oftruth in stories. Telling a story provides the teller witha licence to legitimately deviate from what he or shebelieves to be literal truth, and in so doing reveal a“deeper” or “higher” truth (see, for example [26]), ofwhich the story is illustrative or indicative. So: is thestory of The Smart Jackass true? And does it matter?

Ackoff does not address the literal truth of The SmartJackass, but claims of the Fables in general that he “canvouch for most of them. A few are second hand or more,but the possible inaccuracies. . . in no way detract fromtheir usefulness. . . If they are not true, they ought to be.”However, “the reader may treat all the short illustrationsas fictional” (p. 17). So we do not know whether or notthe events recounted in the story happened or not, but,according to Ackoff, it does not really matter. Houghand White [37] argue, in defending Taylor’s [38] semi-nal 1911 formulation of scientific management againstfindings that his stories of the experiments on the man-ual loading of pig-iron onto rail cars which are supposedto have inspired the theory were probably fabricated inseveral important respects [39,40], that “discrepanciesmust be considered in light of the purpose and natureof the testimony. . . The stories Taylor told were simpleillustrations of the potential gains associated with sys-tematic management. They were designed to be under-stood by individuals from a variety of industries and thelessons from them were designed to be easily transferredto other types of work” [37, p. 596]. The stories maynot have been literally true, but they contained truthsof a “higher order” than the literal. However, the prob-lem comes in identifying these truths: for Wrege andHodgetts [40], Taylor’s stories illustrate a different setof points (including that “anecdotal data are no sub-stitute for quantitative analysis”, p. 120) to those thatTaylor made. Jackson, in his very readable discussion oftruth in stories [41], suggests that “the facts of the pastare of far less importance in our stories than the con-struction of the past in the present. . . Stories are abouttruth, not facts” (p. 36).

Ackoff’s contention that the literal truth of his sto-ries is immaterial seems to be based on an assumptionthat the higher order truths they contain are non-contentious. But, as we have seen, this is not the case.Many alternative higher level interpretations of TheSmart Jackass are possible. Surely they cannot all betrue? A postmodernist stance, rejecting the possibilityof absolute truth, would argue that, in principle, all in-terpretations could simultaneously make equal claimsto relative truth, but Ackoff, at least, might be unhappywith this escape clause. And so, as an anonymousreviewer of this paper has observed, would anyonewho, on the basis of the story, attempted to identify alevel path using the same method as described in theFable, only to find that it did not work. (The authorhas, at the time of writing, been unable to find anyindependent evidence for or against the effectivenessof the “Jackass Method”, but would welcome anyinformation.)

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Table 1A classification of stories according to their literal truth

Possibility Literal truth

Literally true Not literally true

Possible Documentaries (e.g. case studies, factual histories, biographies) Fictions (e.g. hypothetical examples, novels, apocrypha)Impossible Delusions (e.g. mystic revelations) Fantasies (e.g. fairy stories, allegories)

The claim that higher truths are revealed in storieswhich may not be literally true is common in the sto-rytelling literature. However, two issues tend not to beaddressed: The first issue is: how can we distinguishbetween literal content (which may not be true), andhigher content (which, presumably, is intended to be)?Is the distinction simply between that which is explicitand that which is left implicit? Does this mean that ifa storyteller chooses to add an explicit moral to his orher story, that moral is demoted from higher truth to lit-eral content? And does such a demotion undermine itsclaim to truth?

The second issue is: should we assume the veracity ofhigher truths? The implication is that the higher truthsof stories are true, even if the stories themselves are notliterally true. But, as this paper has demonstrated, evena fairly straightforward story can have multiple, andcontentious, interpretations. Therefore the assumptionthat the deeper messages of stories are bound to be truemust be questioned. Storytelling frequently avoids thequestioning of this assumption, resulting in reservationsconcerning the use of stories as educational tools suchas those expressed by Eilon [8].

At the very least, establishing the literal truth, orotherwise, of stories would be valuable. If a set ofevents really happened (or at least if the teller believesthey really happened), this carries different interpreta-tional implications than if it did not. But what is truth?Three broad theories of truth are current. (Glanzberg[42] provides a concise introduction; a more formalaccount is provided by Kirkham [43].) Of these, thecorrespondence theory, in which truth requires a corre-spondence between what is stated and what objectivelyis, might be regarded as the “common-sense” view, andis probably what is generally implied when the truthof stories is under discussion. But the two other the-ories are worth consideration. The coherence theoryregards a statement to be true if it belongs to a com-plete set of coherent beliefs, while the pragmatist the-ory regards a statement to be true if it works as asatisfactory basis for experiencing the world. Both theselatter theories relax to some degree the requirement that

truth must correspond to some independent, objectiveworld, and thus offer the possibility of more flexibleand practical criteria for judging the truth of stories, ac-knowledging the high degree of subjectivity that may bepresent.

In seeking to characterise the literal truth of a story,the degree of literal truth can be placed conceptuallyon a continuum ranging from accounts in which ev-ery detail is just as it happened (or, perhaps more pre-cisely, as the author believed every detail to happen)to tales which are pure fiction, but which might havehappened. However, this does not capture the full rangeof possibilities. For many stories describe impossibleevents, such as Denning’s tale of a business organisa-tion run by squirrels [25]. This leads to a second clas-sificatory continuum, ranging from the possible to theimpossible (acknowledging that placing on this contin-uum may depend on the prior beliefs of the subject).The two continua generate a matrix of four ideal typesof story (see Table 1), which are here labelled doc-umentaries, fictions, fantasies and delusions (this lasttype describing stories which are believed to be true,yet are impossible). Stories are unlikely to correspondpurely to one of these ideal types, and, indeed, maybe differently classified by different listeners (for ex-ample, a “true” story about one’s experience in a pre-vious life could be classed as either documentary ordelusion, depending on the listener’s beliefs about suchpossibilities).

It should be emphasised that the classification ofTable 1 considers only the literal content of stories. Itcan be seen as a superficial layer, beneath which strataof deeper (and alternative) interpretations lie. The truth,or otherwise, of these deeper interpretations is not de-termined by that of the literal content, but it shouldat least be informed by it. Ackoff’s Fables fall in theupper, documentaries/fictions, half of Table 1 (though,as hinted above, there may be a suspicion of fantasyin The Smart Jackass). But his comments, cited at thebeginning of this section, that “if they are not true,they ought to be”, obscure their precise positioningand undermine their interpretation. The cautious reader

622 J.H. Klein / Omega 37 (2009) 615–623

probably ought, indeed, to treat them as fictional. Ack-off’s Fables can easily be interpreted, as has been shownin this paper, in a variety of ways. Unlike Taylor’s sto-ries, the Fables are clearly identified as such. The readershould have no reason to doubt that the point of thestories lies in their higher order content. But what maynot be so clear to the reader is that determining thathigher order content is where the fun of the Fables reallybegins.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymousreviewers of this paper for several encouraging andhelpful comments.

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