Building trust with storytelling: Dialogues and encounters in the Arctic

Engaging in cooperative work can be both rewarding and challenging in terms of innovation and project outcomes. This chapter discusses how stories have potential in enabling trust building and fostering an environment that supports cooperation when projects involve a diverse set of team members. It presents Dialogues and Encounters in the Arctic, a two-year project whose aim is to develop a model for cooperation between communities and researchers in the Arctic regions based on Indigenous Sami knowledge and know-how. Empathy can be broadly understood as ‘an emotional response that stems from another’s emotional state or condition and that is congruent with the other’s emotional state or situation’. As a basic concept, storytelling is a natural human activity.