Storytelling — The Best Way of Passing Knowledge

Jon Revelos (Director – Story Based Learning at TATA
Interactive Systems)  has a great post where he posits that storytelling is the most effective means of passing knowledge from an expert to a beginner.

Using the example of “corporate earnings were 3.2 billion dollars as a data point” he shows that, depending on the story, that might be good news or bad.  It might indicate an upward path, a downward path, or just general confusion.

Imagine the final step in this example chain – instead of
being given a bulleted fact, or even a graphical chart, you are provided a
compelling narrative of the events that influenced a company’s fiscal
performance Maybe a story of how a small oil and gas company played a role in
one of the largest bankruptcies in US history? How recognizible and
well-understood are terms like “securities fraud” in the post
Enron/Worldcom era? Why?  Because stories
were told – stories of greed, arrogance, fraud, trust, loss, and ruin – that
brought obscure accounting terms and practices out of the textbooks and into
the personally relevant world of everyday people.

I’ve always tried to follow Joseph Campbell’s “The Myth of the Hero” model, where he describes the universal pattern of storytelling. 

In this study of the myth of the hero, Campbell posits the
existence of a Monomyth (a word he borrowed from James Joyce),
a universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to, heroic tales
in every culture. While outlining the basic stages of this mythic cycle,
he also explores common variations in the hero’s journey, which,
he argues, is an operative metaphor, not only for an individual, but
for a culture as well. The Hero would prove to have a major
influence on generations of creative artists—from the Abstract
Expressionists in the 1950s to contemporary film-makers today—and
would, in time, come to be acclaimed as a classic.

One of my favorite applications of this model is “Beyond Bullet Points” as described by Cliff Atkinson.  He gives you a great model of how to take a typical boring PPT presentation and re-work it into something that is moving, effective and anything but boring. Each year at TechEd I would see speakers grow and improve using just this model.

“This fellow can make PowerPoint do things that I never knew could be
done at all. What he says is not difficult to do, it’s just a different
way of thinking about how to make a presentation.”
John Matlock Amazon.com Top 500 Reviewer

Powered by ScribeFire.