Story Training: Selecting and Shaping Stories by Hadiya Nuriddin

Author:Hadiya Nuriddin [Nuriddin, Hadiya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ATD Press
Published: 2018-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Why Relevance Matters in Stories

Relevance has many layers, and it’s easy to misjudge what is and is not relevant. Does your story have to be relevant to the content, the learners, or the context? Does it have to be relevant now, or will it only be applicable to the future?

Relevance has always been important, but before we lived in this very customized world, the onus was on the listeners to determine the significance of what they were hearing. There were three versions of the evening news and two versions of your hometown newspaper—you picked one that came the closest to what you believed and, over time, your ideas reflected their commentary. You did the heavy lifting. Now that we can pick and choose what messaging we are exposed to—messaging that reflects our own beliefs back to us—more of the responsibility falls to the messenger. I see this play out in the courses I teach. Learners have grown to expect that nearly all the content, and the examples used to explain it, will be precisely relevant to what they do. If what they’re learning doesn’t reflect their experience, they’ll declare it not relevant.

Ultimately, relevance goes back to those fundamental questions: Why are you telling this story? Why are you telling it now? Why are you telling it to me? In other words, they want to know “What’s in it for me?” or WIIFM. Listeners are searching for the answers to these questions as you talk, and if the answers aren’t obvious you’re in danger of tipping the listeners’ cognitive load. A person can only take in so much information at a time, and with all the other information you are expecting them to absorb, trying to figure out the point of your story adds an unnecessary burden.

It’s challenging to build and deliver a single, simultaneous experience that accounts for the variety of environments our learners come from, but it will be easier for learners to apply what they have learned back on the job if the lesson fits into their work contexts.

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