commentary
Stories in training: Why and when. A response to Fiore and McDaniel
Printable version
Fiore and McDaniel have invited us to debate how telling stories may improve distributed teamwork. It is a welcome invitation, but there is a certain irony to it. Readers of this journal are a distributed team of teachers and learners, yet the medium we are using is largely argument, not storytelling.
Similarly, storytelling is often deprecated among the professionals I serve: team trainers. Training in their networked, military simulations requires trainees to coordinate distributed teams to overcome threats and challenges in complex worlds. These elements constitute stories, when the elements are told. But these trainers favor doing over telling. What little storytelling there is in these distributed simulations occurs in debriefings, and there it has more the flavor of argument ("We missed the target because…") than narrative.
Narrative has value, but to use it well we must identify and apply it to only the problems it solves best. Fiore and McDaniel have begun to explore this in the broad domain of collaborative work. My commentary is focused on the specific domain of team training and instruction. In particular, I illustrate that the domain of narrative is limited, by identifying training problems that are better addressed with argument than storytelling. I then identify problems that do afford solution through narrative. I close with some pragmatic concerns about selecting narrators, audiences, and narratives in team training.
Argument as an Alternative Instructional Vehicle
Most journals in which the present authors publish are not venues for stories. They are not Ploughshares, Zoetrope, or the Sewanee Review. They discourage the use of narrative and biographical accounts. They document debate, the presentation of arguments.
The functions and effects of narrative and argument differ: stories compel through illustration, arguments convince through explanation. Narrative subtly indoctrinates listeners into the values of communities (e.g., hard work, honesty, progress) and influence beliefs about its members (e.g., their trustworthiness). Argument nakedly presents evidence (or grounds) for claims, the warrants (theories, models) and their empirical backing that justify the grounds-claim relationship, as well as qualifications (limitations) on these grounds-claims relationships that are suggested by rebuttals (Toulmin, Rieke, & Janik, 1984).
Arguments can describe specific entities and events (as stories do) and, through warrants, they can compactly define the putative structure and mechanisms of the domain in which those entities and events have meaning. Thus, argument may be particularly useful in helping a distributed team to understand the deep structure of a domain, and indeed it is argument that is typically used to present models of physical systems (e.g., electricity, fluid flow, sensor systems) and intentional systems (e.g., anthropology, marketing, military tactics), a distinction made by Dennett, 1996.
Argument may also help people learn to map specific instances of entities and behavior patterns (evidence) to this knowledge of the deep structure of a domain (warrants) and to make accurate assessments or predictions (claims). This is precisely the objective of military training in analyzing enemy positions and evaluating friendly courses of action; officers study the disposition of enemy forces, map these to doctrinal formations, and make predictions about enemy movement.
In sum, there are training challenges that probably are best addressed using methods other than narrative.
Stories for Instruction
The fact that argument is particularly well suited to certain instructional challenges allows us to focus the application of narrative on other instructional challenges. To identify these, we should consider the key characteristics of stories. Fiore and McDaniel reference social and affective aspects of stories, and so I focus on training objectives that leverage these characteristics.
The most enduring children's stories illustrate the values we wish youth to learn: courage, persistence, creativity, etc. The most affecting novels for adults portray characters who apply these values to resolve conflicts between goals (power, wealth, love). Accordingly, we may wish to apply stories to train people in the goals and values of the institution that their distributed team represents and the mechanisms for resolving conflicts. This is one training objective of military institutions (Alan Okros, Canadian Forces Leadership Institute, Canadian Defence Academy, Kingston, personal communication, 12-13 April 2005), and it is what individual trainers attempt by telling war stories in which loyalty to comrades, creativity, and bravery under fire lead to triumph.
Stories describe instances of the complex role relations between members of distributed teams. This is one function of histories of disasters in commercial aviation (c.f., Tesch & Job, 1999), in which we learn what roles actors should play, which they should not (e.g., the pilot's son should not be given the controls), and how they should coordinate their activities (e.g., one pilot should fly the aircraft while others attend to system failures). When we wish people to learn roles and relations in distributed teams, well-chosen stories may be an effective medium.
Finally, stories have profound influence over our faith in others and our understanding of their competencies and motivations. Thus, we might apply stories to help teammates regain or at least recalibrate their trust in others on whom they must rely. For example, we might encourage a team member perceived as incapable by others to tell stories of success after she or he attains some minimum level of capability.
In discriminating argument from narrative as an instructional strategy, I have made an artificially strict distinction between stories as affective tools and argument as cognitive tools. In point of fact, some stories include the elements of argument (evidence, warrants, claims); some arguments are framed as stories. Similarly, I have implied that one must choose between these methods, when in fact the two forms may be complementary for some training objectives. For example, where we wish to teach trainees to generalize (to succeed in far transfer), some combination of argument and stories may be appropriate. Gick and Holyoak (1983) famously found that telling one story--of a General's successful strategy of converging troops on a castle from different directions--did not enable participants to solve a structurally analogous problem, in which a surgeon must converge radiation on a tumor to destroy it but preserve surrounding organs. Analogical reasoning over problems may succeed when narrative is paired with argumentation that explicates the common strategy or simply hints that one exists (Thompson, Gentner, & Lowenstein, 2000). Precisely how we can integrate argument and narrative is a worthy topic of discussion and of research. Indeed, virtually all of the assertions above are hypotheses; empirical tests are needed.
Practical Problems
Should any or all of the hypotheses above prove out, we must still solve a number of very practical problems before storytelling can be used with reliable effects in distributed team training.
Storytelling is a skill approaching an art form. It is not clear how to select trainers for the appropriate balance of domain knowledge, diagnostic skill, and storytelling ability. It is even less clear whether or how people can be trained to become skilled narrators. A similar concern exists concerning argument, of course. As Kuhn (1991) has demonstrated empirically, argumentation is used rarely, and most often by people with high levels of education. Research is needed to accelerate training in the skills of storytelling and argument.
We need to ensure that stories (and arguments) told well are heard well, that is, by the right audience(s). It is common in large scale training exercises to debrief tens or hundreds of participants on details of interest only to a few. There is a significant challenge in distributed team settings of ensuring that all but only the right audience hears the stories from which we hope they will learn.
Finally, there is the question of which of many stories (and arguments) deserve to be told. Akira Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon (1950, based largely on In a Grove by Yabu no Naka, 1922), contrasts the stories of each participant in an event. Similarly, in distributed team settings, each participant may have a story. What is the most powerful and instructionally useful one to fulfill a given training objective? Similarly, every trainee may be able to extract multiple stories from a given event, where each story might concern different failures, successes, entities, actions, and themes. How can we help a storyteller select the best thread of narrative from the tapestry of their experience?
One strategy for addressing these problems – at least in well-defined domains such as certain military and industrial operations – is to contrast observed behaviors of team members with normative models of organizational roles and procedures. Where violations of norms are observed, the violations and roles of participants could be pushed to the best known storyteller in the team. Those who committed the failure (and perhaps those who were victims of it) could be assembled to hear the story.
I look forward to arguments on these and other points and even to stories of the successful use of narrative in distributed team training.
References
Dennett, Daniel C. (1996). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freeman, J., Cohen, M. S. and Serfaty, D. (1997). Information Overload in the Digital Army: Simulator-based Training for Prevention, Detection & Cure. Proceedings of the 1997 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Washington, D.C.
Gick, M. L & Holyoak, K. J. (1983) Schema induction and analogical transfer. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 1-38.
Kuhn, D. (1991). The Skills of Argument. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Job, M. and Tesch, M. (1999). Air Disaster. Sidney: Australian Aviation.
Thompson, L., Gentner, D., & Loewenstein, J. (2000). Avoiding missed opportunities in managerial life: Analogical training more powerful than individual case training. Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 82, 60-75.
Toulmin, S., Rieke, and Janik. (1984). An Introduction to Reasoning. New York: MacMillan.
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