Eric Berget is a renowned expert in the field of learning experience design, with a particular focus on harnessing the power of storytelling. Throughout his career, he has witnessed firsthand the transformative impact that well-crafted narratives can have on learners, captivating their attention, igniting their emotions, and leaving a lasting impression.

Drawing from his extensive experience, Eric shares personal anecdotes and compelling examples of projects that have seamlessly integrated storytelling into their core. One such project involved designing a training program for a healthcare organization, where he wove together the stories of patients and caregivers, creating an immersive experience that not only imparted knowledge but also fostered empathy and a deeper understanding of the human experience.

Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of human communication and has been used for centuries to share knowledge, experiences, and lessons. In the context of learning experience design, storytelling can be a powerful tool to captivate attention, enhance engagement, and create a more meaningful and memorable learning experience.

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Welcome back to Learning Matters. I'm Doug Wultridge, your host. And today we're gonna take a look at a webinar that Dash's Creative Solutions Lead, Eric Burgett, put together all about the importance of storytelling within Learning Solutions. Let's get to the show. Hello and welcome to this webinar on the role of storytelling in learning experience design. My name is Eric Burgett and glad you're here. Coming to you from my basement in Minneapolis, Minnesota and excited to talk to you today.

So I've got three kids, eight, seven, and four years old. And that's really where this conversation begins. Why am I here talking about storytelling? Well, a few months ago, was tucking in my four -year -old, tucking in my kids to bed, turning the lights off, shutting the blinds. And my four -year -old, he looks up to me and says five words. And these words weren't surprising to me. He says them every

As we're going to bed, he says, tell me a story, Dad. And this kid genuinely loves stories. All my kids love stories. And he always says, tell me a story when you were a kid. And I wish I could tell you that every night I regale my children with these stories of great adventure and lavish tales of childhood, but I do my best. Sometimes I fumble through some old memory, try to turn it into a story.

But there was something about that night that just got me thinking about our human, just innate gravitation toward stories. I started seeing and observing things through that lens of storytelling. Even in my own attention, I just kind of watched how, you know, if I was

at church listening to a sermon and then all of a sudden my drifting attention might snap into focus right when the pastor launched into a story. I just thought this is, it's an interesting, just interesting how ingrained that is.

So here I am talking about the role of storytelling in learning experience design.

As trainers and communicators, we're often handed the task of constructing a contrast between the what is and the what could be, between the current state and the future state, or the normal and the new normal. So let me start by proposing the, what I would call a description for the current state of learning experience design.

Training can too often be boring. maybe the word's not boring, maybe it's uninspiring. Too much of an information dump. It often lacks dimension or relevance, whether it's sales training or product training, software, process, compliance. And of course we know training isn't meant to be entertainment. And that's the challenge. We often have a lot of information.

that needs to be communicated. We have learning objectives and this objective -based approach, which is good and efficient, it gives us this concrete list of information goals and bit by bit, piece by piece, too often we translate that into a list of information, into an e -learning or a training. And if we put that information in front of someone's face,

we can check it off our list and say, you know, we consider you hereby trained. And that's what I mean by one dimensional. And now we're all probably at different places in this journey. Maybe some of you feel like you have been wandering in this bullet point wilderness for 40 years. And you know, maybe there's others of you that are further along in this journey. Maybe you bear the scars and the accolades

you know, past learning programs gone by. Either way, you're here because you sense that there's something more, you know, a better way to train or communicate. So let's explore this power of story together.

What is a story? Let's gather around a shared definition to begin. What is a story? One time I heard an improv actor describe it this way. It is a character in pursuit of a goal in the face of a challenge.

A story is a character in pursuit of a goal in the face of a challenge or obstacle. And story has taken a million different forms and it has had a million different themes and lessons or emotions layered on top. But the greatest stories, whether from a book or a movie or your Uncle Larry,

They have richly described characters and you are drawn in and you ache to see how they're going to overcome obstacles in pursuit of a goal.

And regardless of the emotion or theme that's connected to this story, our hearts and our minds are drawn in when we hear about a character in pursuit of a goal in the face of a challenge.

I think what's interesting is that regardless of what the emotion is, and that's what's peculiar, it's, and it doesn't even have to be the noblest of characters or the noblest of goals. I recently watched a TV show called Ted Blasso, which had this main character who was an American football coach who was hired to be a soccer coach in England.

and he didn't know anything about soccer, but this character was, you know, had unrelenting enthusiasm, positivity, encouragement, despite his weakness and competence of being an actual soccer coach. And so it's a simple story. And I thought what was interesting about it is that the goal in this story wasn't to win the championship, but it ended up being to prevent relegation.

which is basically when if you're the last place team in the league, you get bumped down to a lesser league. And so literally the goal was to not be the worst. And the point is it doesn't matter like how noble the goal is or how elaborate or big, it's just we're drawn in if the character is compelling and we're drawn in to see

They overcome the challenges to meet that particular goal.

and also with the character itself, were more drawn

the more complex the character is. Meaning, if they don't have a weakness or if they are fully competent, it's a less interesting story. But the more we see their weakness or their potential for failure, we're interested to see how are they going to overcome their own complexity or their own weaknesses in the face of a challenge. In this case, a prima donna player,

or an owner who hired him with the intention to fail. We're interested to see how does his strengths and weaknesses interact with those challenges in pursuit of that goal.

Okay, so why is information or content more compelling within this structure? What's so magical about

Well, to answer that question, let me tell a story. 16 years ago, it's January, Bethel University in Roseville, Minnesota, and at Bethel, they have what's called a J -term. It's one full course condensed into one month. And for some reason, I thought it wise to sign up for a class called Literature of the Oppressed.

So there I am down in the basement of Bethel, in the bookstore, filling my bag with books, books of slave memoirs, native accounts of conquest and disease, Holocaust accounts, and many more autobiographies within this genre. I up my bag, 20 pounds of books, about 20 ,000 years of oppression.

on my back as I head back out into the icy tundra of the Bethel campus. At this point, as much as I want to be Mr. Empathy and Mr. Well -Read, I'm thinking perhaps January was not the optimal time to absorb and reflect on mankind's most despicable behavior. And I'm wondering, what cool and depressed professor

would dwell in this unceasing darkness. Well, it turns out this professor was quite remarkable. Dan Taylor, Professor Dan Taylor. He was not cruel and he carried himself with this soft spoken grandfatherly joy. And I mean, it was a heavy semester, no doubt. But it was also beautiful. Professor Taylor used these heartbreaking

first -person stories not as a means to catalog mankind's biggest atrocities, but he used the literature to demonstrate the power of story

So let's return to that original question. What's so compelling about this structure? Why are we drawn

One thing I learned from Professor Taylor in this class is that stories help us learn lessons without having to fully suffer ourselves. We become witnesses. Stories help us learn lessons without having to fully suffer ourselves. So it allows us to stand adjacent to the action and close enough to observe and to even feel the emotion.

Close enough to learn, but not so close to suffer fully as the character suffers.

But I want to highlight the word lessons. Stories help us learn lessons. What lessons? It isn't just the desire for information that draws us in. It's the desire for meaning.

And I think it's something that makes us unique as humans. We are meaning makers and we are meaning seekers. And our brains do that by seeking patterns. We gaze into the chaos of the world and we squint until we discern some kind of recognizable order. You know, we'll look backward into history and ask, you know, what are the dates and moments worth remembering?

When we see dots isolated, we have this feeling that we're compelled to connect the dots and to recognize patterns. And stories represent that the most meaningful way of doing that, making that connection, they instill meaning and they help us take that information and let it stick in our memory. And then it impacts the way we make choices once we have a recognizable

order and understanding to how things fit together. And that's just a big part of what it means to be human, I think. We're hardwired to love and be drawn into stories, like strings on a guitar. You know, our DNA resonates with a story well told.

What does this have to do with my training department? You might be saying, how do we bring this powerful and instinctive art form and this storytelling into learning experience design? And based on how I've started the conversation, you might think I'm going to suggest exchanging our conference room tables for conference room campfires. And I'm not quite sure that's going to pass safety guidelines. So let's think

strategies for and thought processes for incorporating story. And I think the best way to do that is to ask the question, what can stories accomplish?

So we'll go through each of these ideas and be thinking about this in terms of our learning and experience design context. So what can stories accomplish? First, stories can elicit emotion that can fuel a desire to change or improve. And as we go through each of these, I'll show a few examples of projects that help illustrate the point.

about how incorporating story represents these. So this is a project we did a few years ago about emergency preparedness content. So it was a process of taking policy and turning it into a story with illustrations and a style that was very much a look and feel like a children's book.

we were taking this storytelling concept quite literally. So I mean, even the font looks like a storybook font. In this case, we were using the inspiration of that children's book, Very Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, what the name of that was. And basically everything that could happen that's bad, that's in the emergency preparedness policy book,

happens to Mike on one day. And, you know, as far as this character, his goal is just to get through to the end of the day as a normal workday. So again, a modest goal. But along the way, things happen and he needs to decide how to navigate these obstacles. Phones go dead. There's a thunderstorm and the situation gets worse.

a bolt of lightning, computers dead, lights go out. And so then the question becomes, what do you do in these situations? What's the first thing you should do in these emergency situations? So we're able to teach through the story. And again, back to the emotion element. Obviously in this approach, we kind of took somewhat of a humor approach and had a bit of humor emotion that we could

carry along through this story. It's a nice way to balance some of the fear elements of, well, what would you do if a tornado alarm went off and you saw a tornado coming out the window? So pretty intense situations, but you do want to get people thinking and making sure you know, like, who's the first person you should call or what's the first thing you should do?

if there's a missing child situation in the hospital. So different emotions you can elicit it in the context of a story. So this was a fun project, corporated storytelling, like I said, in a very literal way. But let's contrast that with maybe what you don't need to tell an effective story.

And it's not that he wasn't competitive or prideful about it. It was just always kind of boring, easy for him. And when he got to his senior year, he took this physics class and I remember him being really excited about it. And so I was kind of looking and saying, well, what are you guys learning? I'm looking at his textbook and I'm looking at sentences like

The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force and it's inversely proportional to the mass of an object. And I thought, okay, this is no joke. I'm gonna get destroyed in a couple years when I have to take that class.

Well, sure enough, I became a senior, signed up for physics, and I was feeling a little trepidation. Well, it ended up being one of my favorite classes, most memorable classes for sure, in all of high school. And the reason was the teacher. He's a high energy football coach named Jeff Sarasic. And he wasn't just a man of science and sports, he was also a storyteller.

And what I remember most about that class was a stick figure named Maynard. And Mr. Sarasic would use the same character for every illustration of each concept. Every complex equation, every one of Newton's laws would involve Maynard. Whether he was trying to push a large object, fall out of an airplane,

you know, throw a bottle from a boat onto an island. He was getting in all kinds of predicaments. And you know, and whether it was on whiteboard or like the actual exam, he was always Maynard. And so, anyway, I survived physics. I don't think I got an A, but I held my own. And I enjoyed the class way more than I thought I would. And what's the lesson in this? It's not about high art.

or elaborate plot, clever plot structure, complex story. I think we can think in terms of how even stick figure stories can be very effective.

So back to that question, things you don't need to tell an effective story. You don't need a professional illustrator for sure. And you don't need a super complex plot.

What can we learn from that? Well, the second...

thing that stories can accomplish is that they can communicate the essence of an idea. And I think that, you know, the complexity of a physics equation versus the simplicity of a stick figure story is a great way to illustrate that. So third, stories can help your audience imagine a future state.

Stories can help your audience imagine a future state. Kendra Hall, a storytelling expert, describes stories falling into this sequence. Normal, explosion, or disruption, new normal. And I think too often in e -learning or sales presentations, we jump right into the new

part of the story or we jump too quickly past those initial elements and into describing here's what you need to know for what's coming.

And so you see this structure a lot in effective sales presentations or software demos. Think about how Steve Jobs, that famous presentation of the iPhone in 2007, if you haven't seen that or if you haven't seen that in a while, go to YouTube and watch that with a storytelling lens. He starts by laying out the setting, the normal. This is what is. And

After spending time there, with humor, eliciting some emotion, he moves toward the explosion or the disruption. In this case, it is a positive disruption. And then when he gets to describing the future state, the audience is drawn into that all the more because he was dwelling

You know, here's the setting of this story and where, you know, how we kind of ache to overcome these, you know, in this case, these user experience annoyances that just aren't right from a design standpoint. And so by the time he gets to the, future state description, you're drawn in and all the more engaged. So in our training departments, we need to help be the storytellers of that future state.

Now granted, it's a lot easier to get a standing ovation when the future state is an iPhone rather than rolling out a new ERP. Okay. But I think that's what makes it all the more important that we're not just communicating the what, but communicating the why and the setting for why this change is coming. Because if change is on the horizon and especially big

You know that every individual is asking, what will this mean for me? It's a search for meaning and connection and pulling together a recognizable order that they can rewrite their narrative with that information. So we need to be able to compare and contrast the before and after in story terms.

So stories can help imagine that future state. And finally, stories can illustrate the consequences of a series of choices.

Professor Taylor said, at the heart of most stories is choice, the necessity of choosing coupled with the uncertainty of consequences. At the heart of most stories is choice, that necessity of choosing coupled with the uncertainty of consequences. And that's really where learning experience design can

Because we often work in this interactive medium where we can create branchable, clickable realities.

So let's look at a few examples of what this might look like. I think back to this project we did on a common compliance issues in a healthcare setting. And it was broken up into four scenarios. It was a third person narrative. So you, the user, are helping Kim, the character, navigate her day by making choices that impact the story.

It's kind of like a choose your own adventure to some degree.

And so, you know, she would be in her regular day in the life job and have these situations that would come. For instance, a patient would offer a simple gesture of thanks, you know, in the form of a bracelet that her niece made, his niece made or something like that. And Kim would be given the option to politely accept or to politely decline. And so,

Depending on what her choices were, we wouldn't immediately say wrong or, you know, ding, that is correct. It would just move on to the next scene or the next moment in the conversation. But depending on what she chose, it would trigger a variable that later in the module, she would have a conversation with her boss. And that conversation would

the consequence of the decisions she made in those four scenarios. Another example was, this was more of a first person concept, also based on choice, where you're given a set of questions to ask the client as you're trying to solicit information. And

I think there was a set of 12 or 15 questions that would pop up on three at a time and you could ask those questions, solicit the information, it would go into your set of documents as you go back to your office to fill out a form. Just repeating the regular day in the life job that these accountants would do. And so again, not giving immediate feedback to say, oh, you didn't get all the information you needed.

You could literally ask them one question and then say, okay, I've got everything I need and leave. Then once you get back to the office, realize that you don't have enough to fill out the form and have to call back to a client who's a little bit of an annoyed, right? So a very relevant, trying to mimic real life consequences in this e -learning as much as possible.

And then last example here was a sales training project that really emphasized the characters. This one was also a first person setup and had a guide character that really helped give you the lay of the land, establish the setting. And we have this fictitious client called Lux Resort. So already there's this feeling of stakes like, as a salesperson, this is a big

opportunity and we really want to expand our business there. And you could see here, it says you have the ware washing business and you would like laundry and housekeeping as well for these cleaning supplies, cleaning system. And so there's, establish stakes that give that user a goal to work toward. And even simple, you know, it doesn't have to be Hollywood production here, a simple paragraph set

stock photo in the background, and a character introduction. Try to build a little bit of emotion with anticipation to say, okay, this is the general manager here, let's make sure we are paying attention to the details of the interaction. Then we move to meet the character. And in this interaction, one of the objectives they had was identifying the buying role of the person they were talking to.

the buying motives of this particular person and the just little bits of credibility and connection that they could establish. And so they would know these things by clues that were in previous modules or previous slides, email exchanges or a LinkedIn profile that was in the course, or they could observe the room and kind of look at different little

things that were on the wall or things that they observed to say who is this person and What's the connection I can make that's going to help the sale? And so then later on, know, they'd have to choose how to approach this sale What what benefit statements are going to connect with this

All right, so let's recap. You know, what can stories accomplish?

Stories can elicit emotion that can fuel that desire to change or to improve. Stories can communicate the essence of an idea. They can help your audience imagine a future state, and they can illustrate the consequences of a series of choices.

So here's the call to action.

strive to begin embedding story within your training and within your communication. Look at your current set of training materials and try to look at it through a storytelling lens and think, is there anything we could be doing to weave in the element of story within what we're trying to communicate?

Stories are not just another tool in your tool build. They don't just convey information. They convey meaning. I think that's the true power. They draw lines of significance to our knowledge. By doing that, they make the lessons more inspiring and more memorable. Thanks so much for joining us this

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