As I wrote in my description to this blog I love learning through stories. And I still rate the 1-Minute Manager and Our iceberg is Melting as some of the best business books I have ever read. So I would like to try my hand at writing stories about learning and development principles. I also have another reason for wanting to write stories. I honestly do find a lot of learning and development writing dry and very academic (oops hope i don't regret this). These first set of stories are about Larry who has just joined a mid-sized non-profit organisation as the sole learning and development person and wants to create a learning and development strategy for the organisation. Here is the first story.
"So Larry we need to celebrate your new job", said Brian. Larry answered quickly, "how about this Friday?" "No-can't-do", replied Barry. "I'm off to South Africa this Thursday." "South Africa!" said Larry with a raised voice expressing his surprise. "What in the world are you going to do in South Africa?" Brian said, "I am going to see our software developers, they are based there." Brian ran a small business that sold online subscription plans to video based training for rapid elearning development software such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, ISpring Presenter, Lectora Publisher and Camtasia. Previously Brian had been a Commercial Projects and Learning Manager at uCompli, he was Larry's former manager. He had left just before Larry to start the business.
One Response
What’s next?
Nice open loop and a lovely implicit invitation to keep paying attention.
Open loops are a great device to use when telling a story. Get the story started, then you can stop the story when there is a sense of anticipation built. You can then talk about other things. people will often pay closer attention to your 'other things' while they wait for the story to be resumed so they can satisfy their curiosity. Think of the way many soap operas and regular TV shows end their episodes. It is usually an open loop loaded with anticpation. Sometimes they even load the loop by doing a few teaser shots from the next episiode.
Cheers, Paul