"8 Strategies on How to Use Stories to Increase Learning & Facilitate Trainings" - by Terrence Gargiulo

We communicate, think, and learn through stories. Stories come in all different forms including personal experiences, anecdotes, metaphors, analogies, or jokes. The guiding rule for using stories in trainings or workshops is to be sensitive to the group. By staying tuned in to the group’s ever changing needs, you will be able to find the right stories to tell at the right time, elicit group member’s stories and increase learning.

Here are some ideas on how to get started:

1. Answer people’s questions with a story.
Questions are good. It means people are thinking. Get people to draw parallels between the story you tell and the questions they are asking. Provide analysis and insights about the story when people become stuck.

2. Elicit stories from the group.
Try to tie people’s comments together. Ask them to be specific and give examples. They will end up sharing personal experiences in the form of stories. Synthesize their comments with their experiences to make new points and to reinforce previous ones.

3. Use a metaphor or analogy.
Help people to visualize the idea or concept you are trying to explain by applying a metaphor or analogy from another domain. After you provide one, ask them to think of another one. This solidifies the concept for them and gives them confidence. It also allows you to make sure they have grasped the concept.

4. Tell a story to change the group’s energy.
There are natural ebbs and flows to a group’s energy. A story can stimulate and revitalize a group. Likewise, stories can help a group relax and become centered.

5. Tell a story with your voice and body language.
When you tell a story, match the tone and body language of individuals in the group. People will become more aware of what they are saying through their bodies and begin to modify their body language. As they do so, there will be subtle shifts in their perceptions and emotions.

6. Validate and transform emotions with a story.
Tell a story that mirrors the emotions you sense in the group in a non-didactic and unpatronizing way. This validates unspoken emotions and allows people to move past them. Once negative feelings are acknowledged, they can be examined safely through the story and even transformed into more positive ones.

7. Tell a story to change a group’s perspective.
Stories can be used as tools to encourage thinking. A group becomes stuck when it is unable to imagine other possibilities. Stories can be rich sources of irony and paradox. These, in turn, challenge a group’s current thinking and can move them in new directions. 

8. Use a joke or tangent.
Jokes are a great tool for getting people to be less analytical. Jokes are like little epiphanies. A joke is funny because the punch line is unexpected. It hits us as a surprise. Telling a joke or leaving the subject at hand to go off on a tangent will help a group become less analytical and more creative.

This article is reprinted with the permission of ASTD, Alexander, Virgina from the 2001 Fall edition of, Performance In Practice.

If you believe a good session of "Once upon a time . . ." storytelling can't help improve business, Gargiulo asks you to think again.

"Listening is the most fundamental tool and helping people to listen to each other helps real communication occur," said Gargiulo, the author of two books, including The Strategic Use of Stories in Organizational Communication and Learning.

Gargiulo has worked with businesses and groups all over the world, including General Motors, the U.S. Navy, Starbucks Coffee and businesses that are headquartered locally.

His method insists that telling a story empowers people to see each other's work as important, and that can motivate employees to work as a group toward company goals.

After companies go through mergers, reorganizations or acquisitions, Gargiulo said employees need to realign business goals and objectives. As a consultant, he rarely uses the word "story." Instead, he asks employees to share "experiences."

"If you just get people to talk and open up, you create a climate of trust and sharing," he said.

Breaking communication barriers makes the workplace environment stronger because people are far better connected, he said.

His method works best, he said, when the companies continue storytelling.

"Start a meeting by sharing a customer letter or allow employees to post experiences on an intranet site," Gargiulo said. "Then follow up to make sure they are continuing the process."

Reach Katie Grasso at (856) 486-2478 or kgrasso@courierpostonline.com

KEY POINTS

If your business is looking to do any of the following, author Terrence Gargiulo said storytelling can help:

· Create trust and openness in the workplace.

· Create and foster open communication leading to improved job performance.

· Develop working metaphors people will remember which illuminate opinions, rationale and   decisions.

· Encourage and elicit divergent viewpoints.

· Create a relaxed yet motivation-oriented environment.

· Establish active listening to improve project management and work performance.

Stories are fundamental to the way we learn and communicate.  They are the most efficient way of storing, retrieving, and conveying information.  Since story hearing requires active participation by the listener, stories are the most profoundly social form of human interaction and communication. 

Today, more than ever, market pressures force organizations to constantly change and adapt.  It is tempting to believe that the tools of technology can meet today's market challenges head on.  But unless an organization can communicate and learn there is very little that technology can do.  Leaders need processes and strategies to get an accurate read on their company and to communicate visions and missions to employees.

Stories can be used to strategically to galvanize organization in a lot of different ways.  Advertisers have always understood the power of stories.  Take the following example:

A new company wants to enter the butter market.  It wants to sell richly flavored butters.  What story can the company tell to position its product and capture the attention of consumers?

Well, to begin with, let's imagine packaging the butter in old-fashioned miniature crocks and.  Next, let's use a quote “grand-father” figure to be our spokesman.  We'll have grandfather spreading butter on a warm piece of toast while he reminisces about his childhood memories of fresh, rich butter in crocks being brought by Farmer Brown who would come to town with his horse and buggy delivering butter from house to house.

In this simple example we have a perfect illustration of health stories index information and elicit images and the minds of others. Here is a quick breakdown of what's going on in the story.

And it's not only in advertising that stories work well. The following list gives a quick bird's-eye view of some of the other ways:

TOWARD A NON DEFINITION OF STORIES

For those of you would like a more systematic framework for beginning your study led the offer some insight Roger Shank director of the Institute of Learning at Northwestern University :

Stories are everywhere, but not all stories look like stories.  If you consider a story to be a previously prepared gist of something to say, something that you have said before or heard another say, then a great deal of conversation is simply mutual storytelling.  Moreover, if the majority of what we say is in our memories in the form of previously prepared stories, the way we look at the nature of understanding and what it means to be intelligent must change.  Is being very intelligent just having a great many stories to tell?  Is it adapting superficially irrelevant stories into relevant ones, i.e., finding a story in one domain and applying it by analogy to another?  Maybe it means combining stories and making generalizations from them--or, perhaps intelligence is embodied in the initial process of collecting stories to tell in the first place.   (Tell Me A Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory, Schank, Roger pp. 26-27.)

There is a lot to digest in this description of stories. Schank began his research in artificial intelligence, and in order to create a thinking machine he set out to understand how the mind works. He concluded that our minds work in stories. He asserts that stories are all around us. Any time we open our mouths and respond to another person in a conversation, we are accessing memories. These memories are not stored as discrete facts; memories are stored as stories.

We could not possibly hold in our minds all of the data that a computer stores. Think about the disk drive of your computer. All of your documents have been reduced to zeros and ones. Every zero and one must be stored. A computer needs all of the details to restore your word processing document or spreadsheet to the computer's active memory.

Does your mind work in the same way? Absolutely not. Our minds are immeasurably more complex. They do not store all the details the way a computer does. When you recall an experience, your mind takes a chunk of information and reconstructs all of the details for you. Therefore our mind is incredibly efficient. Furthermore, our mind is capable of synthesizing information in new ways. We apply our knowledge or experience from one area to another area.

Schank suggests that intelligence is not defined by the collection or storage of a lot of information but rather by our ability to index our experiences in multiple ways and our capacity for discovering the relationships between experiences in different domains. The hallmark of intelligence is our ability to collect stories and regularly reflect on them in order to continually gain new insights from them.

One of the common misconceptions about stories is that they are used only to convey an intended message. Certainly, stories can be used to communicate a predigested message such as a moral; but to limit stories to such simplistic forms of communication is to miss out on a whole array of nuances and possibilities. Stories interplay with one another. The same story can evoke totally different responses in different people.

Stories do not always begin with the words “once upon a time.” Stories can be as short as one or two sentences. They may not even be expressed in words. In fact, a basic premise of stories is that through them we “enact” rather than “announce” our intentions, thoughts, values, or knowledge. Essentially, stories allow us to model what we want to communicate instead of having to explain it.

Let's agree to broaden our notion of what a story is, and throughout the book let's examine stories across the following five dimensions:

·       Communication

·       Learning

·       Memory

·       Imagination

·       Intelligence 

Excerpt from Making Stories: A Practical Guide for Organizational Leaders and Human Resource Specialists is reprinted with special permission from Quorum Books, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT  1-800-225-5800