S1 E23 Storytelling
Episode Audio
Rance Greene shares what he’s been learning about storytelling.
Connect with Rance on LinkedIn.
Transcript:
The following transcript was auto-generated and may contain typos or spelling errors.
Amy Petricek
Welcome to the share what you learned Podcast. I'm Amy Petricek, a learning enthusiast and the host of the show. The share what you learned podcast is designed for learning professionals to share something they're learning in the field of instructional design. Today, I'm talking to RAND screen about storytelling rants, welcome to the show. We're so lucky to have you on today. Thank you, Amy. It's great to be here. We were talking before I hit record that I said, I feel like we've been friends for a long time. But in reality, we've just messaged or pinged each other on LinkedIn. And this is our first real life conversation. So extra treat on my end. With that, though, rants, I'd love if you could take a minute just to kind of introduce yourself who is rants and kind of where do you fit in the learning and development world? Because you have a super unique niche that I'm excited to talk about. Thank you, Amy. Well, it's great to be here. And
Rance Greene
yeah, so my niche I suppose my contribution to the field of learning and development is storytelling. And what does that mean? Well, we're going to be talking about that. How did I arrive at this I have a history of and an education in theater. And I have a master's in choreography, spent some time in New York City, ended up in a corporate role after many years of doing performance, and then transitioning into a ministry role. And then from there, and to corporate. And in in my corporate role, I found myself in a brand new environment. Corporate, you know, like with his own constraints, and I was like, I'm not sure if I like this corporate thing. But I landed in the position where I was overseeing training for the entire enterprise, at Blue Cross Blue Shield. And I did not know, but elearning was when I landed there. But I did know how to tell a good story. And that's what they were looking for. So I quickly consumed everything I possibly could. Adult learning elearning I mean, you know, I was I was attending every webinar, I could and listening to every podcast and quickly found that my process of creating stories for training and bringing stories center stage and training was something that was kind of unique to the industry. Not that people didn't do it, but that people, a lot of people didn't know how to do it. And so I started doing workshops, and eventually wrote the book, instructional story design, and kind of found just a wonderful welcoming community in the learning and development field, that was really hungry, to learn how to connect with their audiences in a unique way. And so that's, that's what I bring. That's, that's who I am.
Amy Petricek
My experience, again, attending some of your webinars and those kinds of things that you've put out in the world reading your book is just a really kind, warm, generous kind of vibe that you put out into the learning and development world where I, as a learner felt really open and receptive and able to kind of play with ideas or, yeah, new ideas that really helped me to feel successful in building scenario based learning in some of that storytelling. So I'm just going to add that little personal tidbit onto the end there about this as well, if you're not getting that vibe already.
Rance Greene
Thank you so much. It really makes me feel good. And you know, I think that's what we all want, isn't it, we all just, we really want that connection, we want to feel like I'm respected. I'm like, This person has taken time to get to know me a little bit. And so they've designed this experience that like is really like speaking to me. And store design helps us to do that.
Amy Petricek
Talking about story design, talking about all these things I want to dive in. So let's talk about storytelling. And why is it so important to learning and development? You kind of like I feel like brushed the surface on that a little bit and you're like about me, but dig in more?
Rance Greene
Sure. Well, let me ask you, Amy, what why do you think stories work well, and learning and development? Why do you think
Amy Petricek
here's here's Amy's answer, Amy's answer is, I think it's a couple fold, but one is it's really, to for me personally, it's a lot easier to remember a story than it is to remember facts. If you give me like a list of things to remember. I'm most definitely going to forget them unless I write them down kind of thing but a story. It has some sort of logical sequence to it that helps my brain kind of remember that. I will also say stories feel, from my vantage point, they feel applicable to my world, where sometimes if learning content is really dry, or just really factually based, remembering that is harder, because you're trying to think like, why is this important to me? What does this pertain to in my world? And when you can see that direct application where someone just spoon feeds it to you, it just sinks in a little bit more. And when you're in that actual experience in your job, then you're like, oh, yeah, this is, this is where this comes in and apply such skills or scenarios.
Rance Greene
Oh, I couldn't have said it better. So you answered your question very well. But yeah, stories are memorable. So yeah, if you want, if you want people to remember what you're training them on, you know, couple of with a story is, if you want people to take action on your training, mores stories are a wonderful way to do that, you know, they act like a flight simulator, they prepare you to take action. And I think another reason why they are both of those things is that because stories are so emotional, they're a wonderful vehicle to to convey emotion. Because our we're open to that, right? The corporate world at large, you know, not so much, not not so much open to just an emotional experience. Not every company is like that, but a lot of them are. But a story is kind of a disarming way to give some emotional input, that will help them make better decisions, that will certainly help them to integrate new knowledge, new skills, new attitudes in the learning.
Amy Petricek
I love all of that. And I love how you continue to expand that and brought more to it. So thanks. Thanks for helping me answer your question.
Rance Greene
Yeah. And I felt like your your answer about, you know how stories applied to my job, or like its application. That's the actionable part, we feel that, you know, when we watch a story, we're feeling it, it's preparing us the neurons are firing, we're ready to take action on it. So yeah,
Amy Petricek
that was the other thought I had is kind of as I was referencing that sometimes dry or more factual, maybe process based learning. It just sucks all emotion out of that, and, and storytelling as a way to kind of integrate the whole person even in their learning.
Rance Greene
So yes, so that's a beautiful way to say it. Yep.
Amy Petricek
So you get to talk to a lot of people about storytelling, if you didn't catch earlier, he has a book, which I will include in the show notes. So you all can be sure to read that it's a great story, definitely want to check that out. But what are some gaps that you hear a lot about, or see frequently with storytelling and instructional design, I'm kind of just trying to look for maybe some common themes in the industry that you started to identify.
Rance Greene
I think that in instructional design, in our instructional design world, we do a lot of telling. We tell people what to do. And what stories force us to do is show we show the action. So what I mean by that is, you know, there's, if you have a course, you know, usually the first slide is something like the learning objectives of this course are to understand the concept of empathy. And then we go on to like, define empathy. And then we describe empathy. And then maybe we'll give an example of empathy before we give them the test. But we haven't made it up all the way up that design continuum to practice. We haven't given any demonstration, we just tell, tell, tell, tell. And I think that that habit of not every instructional designer, of course, but that habit of telling, telling, telling translates into our stories. When we sit down to write, and so, you know, we know, we know what a story is, we know how to tell them, like we tell them all the time, like if I were to tell you right now, you know, this afternoon, my wife and I, we, you know, hitched up our dog, or a little, little five pound white dog, and we went for a walk outside and it was gorgeous outside today. So we started walking down the sidewalk. And we got to this one place where where it opens up, and we're kind of out of the neighborhood into this, you know, open space and the wind voided ever start blowing nuts, which is why my hair is kind of wild today. So, as I'm telling you this story, you're with me, you're kind of visualizing ranse his wife, his dog, walking, you visualize when the wind is blowing, it must be, because I'm showing you the actions that we took. But when we sit down to write a story, it seems like, like, I'm now I've got to be formal. Now, I've got to be like serious about this is a serious story. This is Francesca, she just received an envelope with tickets to a concert, should she accept them? You know, like, who's Francesca, frankly, we don't care. We don't care if she takes the tickets or not, you know, it's a conflict of interest. So what, but, you know, if we were to tell stories in our training, like we told stories in real life, you know, Francesca sits down and does, she's going through a mail, as she opens this one, from a vendor. And out of this envelope, falls tickets. It's it's tickets to a concert to her favorite band. Now, we could care a little bit more about Francesca, we know, you know, that there's some conflict here. And, and we don't we don't over analyze, right? We just tell the story. Just tell it. So I think that the gaps are, Show, don't tell. And I would say that would apply to both instructional design and also to our storytelling.
Amy Petricek
I love the examples he pointed out because you did exactly what you said you showed versus just telling us about this difference. But you showed that and those examples, I think to me, are really clear on what that difference is one of my like personal takeaways, as you're sharing that is to continue to one add more detail into the stories that I am telling to kind of paint that scene a little bit more. But to also be a little bit more strategic, I would say in the details I'm putting in that story to be aware of, of how that's formulating the story, instead of just like, there's a red car over that, you know, like, you can tell details too, but like being strategic in the details that you use to paint that story. So I've got my own little takeaways, and I'm going to be adding those in my next course builds. So thank you.
Rance Greene
You're right Details, details really add that, that emotional connection, they help us picture things, they help us get into the story ourselves. And you're also right, in that you can choose only a few. And that's enough.
Amy Petricek
So kind of piggybacking off of that, what are some maybe easy or low lift ways to add storytelling into our learning experiences?
Rance Greene
Yeah, I think the book is about 13 chapters. And a lot of that is the three phases of story design, which is discover the story, design the story, deliver the story. Story, design is a way of thinking during the instructional design process. It's a way of thinking. So I would say if you want to start, start at the beginning, start during the analysis phase of instructional design. That's where you start thinking in terms of story. Who are the characters? What's the problem that we're trying to solve here? What's the best solution for that problem? Already, as instructional designers, we're kind of wired to think in terms of stories. Because we want to know who the people are that we're training, we want to know what they should be doing. And we also want to present the best solution for them. And so if as a designer, then that solution we can assume is going to be training, not every project that's put in our lap. The solution is training. But, you know, if we if we've gotten that far gotten that far to us, then probably is going to be a training solution. So I would say start in the analysis phase. And when you're in analyzing two things to keep in mind one is really dig in and find out who you're teaching who you're who you're training. Just find out some things about your audience, even above and beyond what they already know about the subject you're gonna be training on, also get to know what are their current circumstances at work? How are they reacting to those circumstances? What are their fears, what do they value? Because as you get to know them as people, then it begins to give you some ideas on how to design for those People for your instruction, but it also helps you to create to collect valuable information to create relatable characters. Because otherwise you're just kind of like, you know, hidden hidden mess in the dark. Is this character going to be relatable? If you don't know your audience, you won't know. If you do know your audience, you know, success rate goes up.
Amy Petricek
Am I correct that you're, it's been a hot second since I've read your book. So I'm going to ask for a refresher in that I believe you talked about this in your book and you give an example of possibly being in that analysis stage and doing some of that deeper diving into your learner's and discovering that a lot of the people on this team like to watch football and so then creating a story around a football game or getting football tickets, something like that. And so again, it's not that work related component, it's those extra layers of getting to know your, your learner's, am I am I remembering that correctly?
Rance Greene
Yes, yeah. So like, you're getting to know what they do in their spare time for sure. I mean, that could be, you know, the, if maybe you're telling a metaphor story, and you want it to take place, you know, somewhere that's not even in the workplace, you know that, and it's just a parallel story to reality. So there's a lot of advantages to getting to know who your audience is what they like. And, you know, the smaller that audience is, the more specific you can be. But, you know, sometimes you'll be training the entire company. And you'll need to still make an audience profile for that group of people, there is something common about them, there is something that you can get that is, you know, common experience with all of them. Even if it's something outside of the training itself, if it's, you know, if you're training the entire call center, you know, what are the pressures that they're feeling in that call center, if you're training, a company that is going through an organizational change, and all the upheaval that comes with that, you know, how does that impact, you know, what's going on in the story itself, those, those external pressures really helped to heighten the conflict in your story. And they and they also just give you, like, people know when you know where they're coming from. And the second thing, during that analysis phase is, of course, knowing what they're supposed to be doing. And I call that collection of things that they should be doing an action list. That's what I call it, my team calls it that I trained my stakeholders to call it that we all call it an action list, because I want everybody to be aware that we are training people to do observable actions with no, I don't care about them being aware, or understanding, like, we need to dig a little bit deeper and find out what do people do when they're aware? What do people do when they understand what are the observable actions. So create an action list that has observable actions and a logical order?
Amy Petricek
Now you're getting into like good objective writing to the Iran's all coming together,
Rance Greene
just to kind of like complete the picture, then then that action list is going to serve as your list, basically, of your conflict, that's going to be the source of your conflict, your characters are going to be in conflict with that action list.
Amy Petricek
This to feel like some really approachable step site. I appreciate that. And I really like that you've highlighted how early on in the process, it is to start thinking about story design. That if it's an afterthought, something you're tacking on at the end of building a course. I think that will show because I think what you're saying is even there's an analysis component to the story, along with the actual course.
Rance Greene
Yes, absolutely.
Amy Petricek
You have a book out that I've referenced earlier called instructional story design. And I've read this and felt like this was a really great resource as I was beginning to dip my toes in this world. And so I'm just kind of wondering, like, Who is this a good resource for and who would be, you know, thinking about audience and things like who is a good audience of someone that would benefit from learning more about storytelling and reading your book,
Rance Greene
as well. The primary audience obviously, is instructional designers. So if you are a seasoned instructional designer, you're going to benefit a lot from this book. In that it gives you it takes your design to the next level. And if you are beginning instructional designer, storytelling is a wonderful entry point into instructional design because we understand stories already. So this is starting its marry is a marriage of instructional design and story designed together. It's just a really solid process. So I would say that's the primary target. Yeah.
Amy Petricek
It's very readable to like I said it is it does have like the story format to it as well. So I struggled to finish books, but that was one I read all the way through because it was very readable. rants, let's go ahead and transition over to the Rapid Round, which is a series of questions I get to ask all of my guests regarding regardless of the topic, so I'm going to start with one that you get to fill in the blank on or finish the sentence and it is learning is
Rance Greene
learning is self discovery. Not being told what to do.
Amy Petricek
rants when you're mustering up the courage to learn something new. What song do you put on?
Rance Greene
Amy? I have silence. I think in silence. I don't have music playing when I'm working. And I don't have music playing. Really anytime during the day. I just love silence.
Amy Petricek
That sounds like a peaceful day Rance!
Rance Greene
doesn't mean I don't like music. I do. Listen to plenty of it. But in the work and then the learning. Yeah, I like to be quiet.
Amy Petricek
You're asked to do a brand new task with a skill set you do not yet have Where do you turn?
Rance Greene
First I pray God for help. Then after that, I dig into who my audience is. If it's a story design solution, then I'm I really dig into who my audience is what they need and how story design can help them. If it's something like you know, an administrative task, yeah, I have to you know, like learn new tools to run a business or something like that. Then I search. I search like everybody else on the internet.
Amy Petricek
All right, last one, you'll finish the sentence on this one too, without learning
Rance Greene
without learning. Your story is a series of mistakes that happen over and over again. So poetic
Rance Greene
I'm quotable!
Amy Petricek
Rance, what's the best way for my listeners to be in contact with you after the show? Should they want to be in touch? And also, is there anything you're working on that you'd like to share about?
Rance Greene
Yes, they can be in touch with me. First of all, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, I would love to hear from you. Go to Anita story calm for a new thing that we have going on right now is that we've just started the school of store design. And so we have a lot of courses on the school of store design. Right now. They are mostly workshops. But we are designing some blended learning experiences as well. I have a workshop actually on instructional story design coming up at the end of April. So if you are interested, go to school of store design comm click on the courses and look for the instructional story design course. And then for those of you who are interested in script writing, I do a roundtable of instructional story designers twice a year. And the one that's coming up in August, is focused on script writing. And then lastly, I do a cohort every year also for leaders who are interested in becoming better communicators through storytelling. And that's like a four, six week session with a capstone project at the end. And you get really close because it's a small group of people. So that's also on the Courses page at the School of story design.com
Amy Petricek
Well, be sure to include the link to that because you are not going to want to miss that. I've been to some of his workshops previously and it is one a bundle of fun, too. You learn a lot and three. Well, if you're lucky, maybe there'll be a V on video with a caricature of Ranson it to
Rance Greene
Undoubtably!
Amy Petricek
thanks so much rands for sharing all about storytelling with us today. Be sure to check out Anita story.com his website. I also want to give a shout out to you my listeners for learning with us today. Until next time, stay open, receptive and kind.