At this year’s annual American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) 2014 International Conference and Exposition—at which the Society changed its name to the “Association for Talent Development” (ATD)—father and son team, Gerry Beamish of Beamish Associates and Jonathan Beamish of Accenture, presented an informative program, “Cave Wall to Internet: Storytelling, the Ancient Learning Art.”
Their presentation itself demonstrated the technique as both of these men, who were presenting jointly for the first time, used stories to demonstrate the didactic usefulness of storytelling to help illustrate valuable lessons and to make the lessons memorable. They began by asking whether participants recognized these traditional stories:
- The Boy Who Cried Wolf
- The Tortoise and the Hare
- The Emperor’s New Clothes
- The Ugly Duckling
- The Princess and the Pea
They demonstrated how these universal stories can be applied to modern-day situations, such as describing the popping of the dot.com bubble in the late 90s as a contemporary version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, or using The Tortoise and the Hare as a way of explaining the current struggle of competing companies to keep up with technology. The advantage of using these stories is that employees who are familiar with the stories will quickly identify how the learning objectives in these stories apply to whatever training topic you are addressing.
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Storytelling Is Ancient
The Beamishes related that storytelling is not new, and they pinpointed these historical milestones in storytelling:
- Cave painting
- Tapestries
- Printing press
- Watercooler gossip
- Social media
Their point is that storytelling seems to be a fundamental human method for exchanging personal and professional information, and each generation uses each new technology and social setting to tell their stories. For example, Facebook postings and Instagram images could be considered today’s cave paintings and tapestries.
The Beamishes even go so far as to assert that it’s not our experiences in life that shape us but the stories we tell about these experiences that is what shapes us, because telling the story of the experience is how we process it.
So tapping into this embedded storytelling function that all humans share is a naturally effective way to dispense valuable training information to your employees.
But this powerful method is not guaranteed to work. There are certain types of training objectives that can be met with stories and other types that cannot.
When to Use Stories
The Beamishes compiled a list of four main occasions to use a story in training and three other occasions where stories may also be helpful. Use stories:
- To simplify a complicated point or idea
- To illustrate or reinforce a point
- To achieve impact or grab attention
- To retain attention or address an issue indirectly
- To address a challenging issue, such as personal conflict
- To set a direction
- To maintain progress on a journey
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In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll look at what makes a good story in training, and we’ll showcase a comprehensive online learning library of ready-to-use courses on more than 100 key HR topics.