When you receive corporate training, your company is investing in you. They are offering you a large information dump, maybe paired with some exercises. They want you to learn the information, reflect on it, and apply it. In other words, your company is giving you training because they want your behaviour to change.

Stephen Grosz says in his book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, “People don’t change because they are frightened. They change because they are haunted.” In other words, teaching you scary information won’t make you change your behaviour. But sharing stories may make you choose to act differently. This is important because the best tool to change a person’s behaviour is by having a profound experience, and a close second is through experience transfer, which is what occurs when we engage in a great story.

In the construction industry, trench safety protocols are supposed to lessen the risk of a worker being buried alive. And yet, 45 people a year die from cave-ins on a worksite. When we hear a story about the death of a construction worker because of a profits-before-people manager or a company with a bad safety culture, we may feel fearful or even angry. But when the full experience is transferred to us, the whole story, we are confronted with the prospect loss because we can imagine being in the situation and we feel haunted.

Meet Jennifer. She has a decade of experience in trench construction. She proactively submitted a request for a trench safety equipment but it was ignored. She refused the unsafe work request, but her manager pressured her into it. Jennifer was buried alive in that trench, and she died. She left behind an 11-year-old boy who loved dinosaurs and a 14-year-old girl who had just won a robotics competition. When we learn the details of the story, we feel the humanity and the loss that her family experienced. We think to ourselves “That could’ve been me. Or my sister. Or my friend.” After placing ourselves in her steel-toed boots – in her life – workplace safety becomes more important to us and we fight hard to protect our families from experiencing her family’s loss. Our beliefs change. Our behaviours change. Our workplace improves.

When we learn about Jennifer’s experience or when we go through our own new experience, something changes inside of us. Our worldview shifts, says psychologist Dr. Gary Klein in his book Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insight. Dr. Klein describes five different strategies for gaining understanding:

Dr. Klein says that new experiences encompass one or more of these strategies to help us gain understanding. When we gain understanding, we change how we see the world. But, he says, simple stories are not enough – we need whole, full, real-life experiences.

• Connections are the difference between knowledge and experience. Every new experience allows us to connect the dots further to other situations in our lives.
• Coincidences train us to become detectives, hunting for clues to predict the outcome. Our brains operate by recognizing patterns from prior experiences.
• Curiosities lead us to question what we know. They encourage us to have an open mind, but also a cynical mind.
• Nothing makes us more curious than contradictions. Contradictions help learners make our own discoveries, instead of telling us how to think. Letting us see the contradictions associated with our mistaken beliefs allows us to test out a new belief system.
• Finally, creative desperation from a total impasse leads to unique insights. When you sit in a classroom or click through an online course, you are learning.

But the information does not become real insight unless you were exposed to the strategies described above. If you needed to learn about natural gas safety, a voice talking over a slide deck would not change your behaviour. But story-based experience transfer just might…

When we learn about Jennifer’s experience or when we go through our own new experience, something changes inside of us. Our worldview shifts, says psychologist Dr. Gary Klein in his book Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insight. Dr. Klein describes five different strategies for gaining understanding:

Dr. Klein says that new experiences encompass one or more of these strategies to help us gain understanding. When we gain understanding, we change how we see the world. But, he says, simple stories are not enough – we need whole, full, real-life experiences.

• Connections are the difference between knowledge and experience. Every new experience allows us to connect the dots further to other situations in our lives.
• Coincidences train us to become detectives, hunting for clues to predict the outcome. Our brains operate by recognizing patterns from prior experiences.
• Curiosities lead us to question what we know. They encourage us to have an open mind, but also a cynical mind.
• Nothing makes us more curious than contradictions. Contradictions help learners make our own discoveries, instead of telling us how to think. Letting us see the contradictions associated with our mistaken beliefs allows us to test out a new belief system.
• Finally, creative desperation from a total impasse leads to unique insights. When you sit in a classroom or click through an online course, you are learning.

But the information does not become real insight unless you were exposed to the strategies described above. If you needed to learn about natural gas safety, a voice talking over a slide deck would not change your behaviour. But story-based experience transfer just might…

You’re about to participate in the story of 23-year-old Peter, a young hydrogeologist. As you put yourself in his fancy leather shoes, you are using all five strategies to gain insight. You will form connections between yourself and Peter. You will feel curiosity about how his story ends. You will enlist your inner detective to make predictions. You may experience a contradiction to the ending you predicted, and finally, you will experience Peter’s creatively desperate solution with wild consequences. Here is his story.

Thomas Kuhn might be the most respected philosopher of science of the twentieth century. He invented the idea of a ‘paradigm’ and how to shift it. He says that if a paradigm appears to solve problems well, then a person will fight against alternatives. For example, when you drive a car, you may turn right by watching for a gap in the cars coming from the left, then checking for pedestrians on the right, then turning right. That would be your turning-right paradigm. If someone suggested that you should change it, you would resist. This is called Risk Homeostasis.

The opportunity for change happens after a crisis – it happens the first time a cyclist tries to go straight alongside your passenger door and you turn into their path and knock them to the ground. After that experience, your new turning-right paradigm includes a right-side shoulder check for cyclists. Kuhn says that when a crisis happens, people begin to see that their current paradigm isn’t working. They open their minds and slowly begin to gather new observations, which, in turn, help to shape a new paradigm. After a truck driver tips sidewards into a ditch, the other drives are more careful for a few days. But without any reinforcement, they revert to their old paradigm. After an engineer makes a terrible mistake, there is an improvement in quality control for a while. But if the reviews are not catching errors frequently, people forget how important these checks are.

The question every company wants to answer is “how do we create crises frequently and safely?” Well, good news! If we know the paradigm we want others to follow, then we can use experience transfer to contradict any other paradigms that we want people to dismiss.

That’s a lot to ask out of workplace training. We’ve made it easy. OntheJob is an experience transfer software platform. We help our customers and partners create gamified scenarios intended to create positive behavioural change. Every scenario places the learner in the shoes of the storyteller, leaving them haunted, curious, and awakened.

At OntheJob, we can package deep workplace insights and transfer them to others. When learners put themselves in a situation, they experience ‘Aha!’ moments. We can capture a coveted commodity: wisdom. OntheJob’s software works to boost existing workplace training, not to replace it. It is designed specifically for experience transfer. Each story is told scene by scene, just as the storyteller experienced it. After every scene, the learner has to think critically and apply course information. The stories are haunting – injuries, deaths, lawsuits, losing lots of money, being fired, etc. They make learners curious about how they might have handled the situation differently. The games are intended to be played in only 10-15 minutes, as short refreshers. Participating in these frequent crisis situations will lead to real behavioural change.

Workplaces send you to training to change your behaviour. Companies spend a lot of money and work hours on courses. But those courses alone will not change the way you act in your job. Not without experience transfer! New experiences haunt learners with stories of loss. They stir up curiosity. They shift people’s paradigms. When learners learn theory, it is forgotten; when they hear a story, they remember it; but when they become the storyteller, they change their behaviour.