Did you share how your day went, what situation you encountered at work, or that funny situation that made you laugh? Is the water cooler your favorite place to tell your colleagues all about your weekend? Then let me tell you, you are a storyteller.
Telling stories is a way to share information. It helps us engage with others and lets us learn new subjects and information. 65% of our daily conversations are based on storytelling. Going way back, the first stories were shared with cave drawings and hieroglyphs. Later on, stories were actively shared by troubadours, who shared heroic stories in song. Stories that we nowadays read in books, or see in movies and series. And did you know that it can also be used in learning tools?
Transferring information by a dry summary of data and facts, lists of words, or protocols isn’t fun for anyone. Try telling a story or a case study instead. In that story, you can introduce a (fictional) employee who encounters specific problems or dilemmas in the workplace. He makes certain choices (or the learner makes the choices for him) and deals with the consequences. That makes the learner think. What is the situation? What is expected of me? What happens if I choose one or the other? Making mistakes is ok. They learn from this and can ultimately make the right decision during a test or on the work floor.
Storytelling and scenarios in learning tools have countless advantages. This is because of empathy, involvement, meaning, visible consequences, motivation, and structure. You can read all about it in this article. Using storytelling helps learners to understand the information and actively apply the gained knowledge to real-life situations. And last but certainly not least: it is remembered better, and it is much more fun!
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