Post By: David Barr, co-founder CampbellBarr
“What our teams really value is talking about our own stories.” This comment comes up in every kick-off meeting when developing a new training course. And it makes perfect sense. Ultimately any training messages need to be brought into a learner’s own context and applied there to show relevance and value. However, having gone down this road many, many times with clients we’ve shifted somewhat from our eager nodding agreement and requests to gather internal anecdotes. Today we will gently push back (we are British after all…) and suggest that though their own stories are where you want your learners to finish, it is often not the best place to start.
Let’s break that down a little more.
Most of the time, but not always!
Firstly, this isn’t a blanket position to always apply! When it’s public knowledge that a company is under investigation or a major incident has occurred, then employees are clamoring to better understand what is happening and to simply talk about it. Ironically, this is often when E&C teams feel most restricted in what they can say. Breaking down the challenges of leaning into your own crisis story is a longer story for another day, suffice to say here; when everyone outside is talking about “your stories”, you do need to find the right way to lead with it – often pushing back on the instinctive reactions from other functions.
The elusive internal example
Fortunately, most of the time companies are not in the midst of a major crisis and the request is to mine the near misses or the smaller scale issues that bring risk points to life. Again, we must be careful not to over generalize here, as some companies are tremendous at gathering and valuing their internal examples, but for many it can be a frustrating task, chewing up a lot of time before being abandoned. Though it feels intuitive that any organisation of scale will have plenty of stories ready to be tapped, in practice leaders or managers can be reluctant to share “teachable moments” if they think it’s going to be widely used, or they feel their story just isn’t interesting enough.
We’re certainly not saying it’s pointless to look for internal case studies, they can be hugely valuable used in the right way, but from repeated experience it is frequently a more time-consuming and fickle challenge than originally planned!
End result, rather than first step
However, the main lesson we’ve consistently gained from looking to spark candid discussion, is that starting with a story that feels too close to home for participants, often hampers rather than enables discussion. We’ve found this to apply across geographies and seniority levels. Immediately opening with a challenging “how did this happen here” or at a close competitor, will ignite discussion, but participants are wary; many feel like they have to give the “right” answer or emotion; and much energy goes into explaining “but we are different”, rather than candidly reflecting on points of similarity.
Instead, by taking as a little as 10 minutes to kick-off with an unlikely (or seemingly entirely unconnected) story the group can be engaged in a significantly more open and relaxed manner, and from there nudged into a genuinely more self-reflective mindset. Participants then raise their own stories or concerns and that’s the gold dust in any training session.
Your unlikely opener still needs to have the underlying themes that will enable the transition through to your core messages but as so much compliance or ethics training comes down to the better appreciating the human dynamic and opening up to our points of vulnerability there is a huge array of rich stories to draw on. The sports world offers a seemingly endless supply (particularly if you’re looking for your group to open up on how situational pressures may blinker and erode their decision-making), but unlikely stories can come from anywhere. We’ve used rock bands to talk about process safety, ferry disasters to engage on anti-bribery and Formula 1 to explore competitive pressures.
With a vivid but seemingly removed example participants will open up on the themes they believe drove the behavior of the characters involved and then the simple question becomes “so which of those factors ever turn up here?” As the participants themselves have brought the factors into the discussion, their willingness to then reflect back on their own context is markedly different compared to this being the opening request.
“Teams want to talk about their own stories”, yes they do…. eventually.
About the Author: David Barr has worked in E&C education for over sixteen years. David co-founded E&C education specialist CampbellBarr ten years ago. Since 2009 CampbellBarr materials have been delivered to nearly 1 million global employees via live training sessions. david@campbellbarr.com
Nice message, David! It can be tough to get there but the payoff is so good.
Thanks for sharing this interesting insight! I have never thought about this, but now that you are telling us, I realise that I can relate to your message also through my training experience. Yes, they would like to talk about their stories — eventually, once they ‘warm-up’ for it.
Comments are closed.