The stories we tell ourselves

Most of my childhood consisted of stories and sayings; two parents from the South so it comes with the territory. So obviously as a kid, I believed these stories and sayings ??

For instance, let's see if you recognize these oldies but goodies. Knuckle-Cracking Leads to Arthritis.?Swim Too Soon After Eating and You'll Cramp up and Drown.?Watermelons Will Grow in Your Stomach from Swallowed Seeds; a Texas favorite.?Touch a Toad and You'll Get Warts.?Santa Claus Knows If You've Been Naughty or Nice; if that were true there was a span from 8 to 13 years old where all I should have received was coal in my stocking.????.

Those were the stories I told myself and I believed them... until I learned the rest of the story. Same for my career in L&D. I told myself that learning styles, eLearning, ILT and workshops worked until I saw evidence that they were a myth or were not as effective, nor as wanted by learners, as I believed.

There's the story of my friend's employer who told themselves that one-day leadership workshops were a success even though most of the evidence said differently.

There's the panel I sat in on recently where the presenter(s) shared their research story that over 50% of front-line workers in manufacturing wanted to grow into leadership positions. That struck me as strange as I'm part of a cohort group of 2nd & 3rd Tier manufacturers who struggle to get front-line operators to grow if it means changing their current shift or leading people.

There's the vendor in a recent webinar who shared the story of their success using mobile learning in employee career growth, yet when I asked what was the cost for reimbursing employees using personal cell phones for work related learning and how it improved performance... well the growth was related to other measures and no response to the cost.

And there's the measurement expert who promoted that training improves performance. Based on a quick review of the research he cited it appeared training did improve performance, but there were a lot of other variables involved in that improvement and some of the cited studies measured non-performance results.

Am I criticizing them? Not al all, they told a story and I believe there is truth to their stories. But is there more to the story than just the headline or statement. I wish the story tellers would do more to ensure that the story content explained the nuances. I wish the story listeners would ask the questions and read the fine print before just believing the story.

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised because I see, and do, this much too often; believing the stories we tell ourselves without researching the story behind the story. Don't believe me, get on any social media and I'm sure you'll soon see something that makes you ????

So my fellow L&Ders, please ask the "Who, What, When, Where, Why and How" of the story. Thanks for reading. Until next time...