Things are under control again. This is a story which I made up, after being told particular versions of this story by a number of people. They tried to maintain control by low overhead organizational efforts such as piles, which still gave them some measure of control, and some ability to find things. And then they felt good, in control of things for a while. Extensive efforts were made to evangelize the proposed interface mechanism to the groups that might actually implement it in the Finder.
Stories are particularly useful for communicating within the organization for two reasons.
First, stories are memorable. In contrast, stories seem to sidetrack the debates about methodology. People understand that stories are not accurate, that they are likely to bend the truth for rhetorical ends, and so the discussion tends to be of the issues raised by the stories, rather than their obvious shortcomings. He notes that practitioners are not initially presented with well-formed problems, but rather with messy, indeterminate situations. I suggest that for the interaction designer, stories provide one way to deal with this indeterminacy.