Introducing a Set of Guidelines for Facilitating Movie-Script Writing, as a Tool for Transferring Knowledge inside Organizations

Abstract: The importance of knowledge transfer inside organizations is an undisputable fact, which got the attention of managers in recent decades. One of the most important reasons that make the knowledge transfer a compulsory task is the danger of its loss. Storytelling in any of its forms, including movie script writing, facilitates knowledge transfer by the use of its potency in representing different information’s component and interrelationships between them. But using movies and movie-scripts in organizations as a knowledge management tool is not as easy as it sounds. There are some issues that should be considered, otherwise the result will not be as good as expected or can even have negative effects on the audience. Based on a search that we have done, we noticed the lack of a comprehensive research which tackles these issues from both knowledge management and scriptwriting perspectives, and provides practical solutions for them. In this thesis we introduce a set of guidelines to inspire knowledge managers or screenwriters who are supposed to write a movie script for transferring knowledge inside organizations. These guidelines may facilitate this process by guiding them to foresee and prevent the issues and solve the problems which may occur.For achieving this goal, we first did a comprehensive literature review and developed a set of guidelines. Then we applied the resulted guidelines on a case. Finally, we evaluated them by utilizing method triangulation. We asked experts' opinions about the applicability and efficiency of the guidelines, tested the clarity and understandability of them, and tested the performance of a movie script which we wrote for the case. The result of the evaluations was pretty satisfying. The knowledge management and screenwriting experts gave us positive comments about efficiency of the guidelines. The managers, who we consulted, found this set of guidelines applicable in real situations. The clarity and understandability test returned an average of 75.58% positive results, which shows that the user of the set of guidelines can read and understand it easily. Finally the test of the movie-script, which we wrote for a real case according to the guidelines, resulted in an average of 85% correct answers. It shows that we were successful in transferring the knowledge, which was embedded in the movie-script, to the recipients. The experts’ opinion and test results indicate that these guidelines are clear, understandable, applicable, and may efficiently facilitate the process of screenwriting for transferring knowledge inside organizations. It can increase the benefits that organizations make from investing in film production by the purpose of transferring knowledge internally.