RavingLEARNatics

A quick guide to storytelling & personalization

Over the past few years I have done significant research on how stories impact learning. I have also been fascinated with personality typing and how it could be applied to learning to personalize the experience. This quick guide (pdf) contains information that has been gathered and condensed from the list of books found at the end of the guide along with my experience designing and developing learning content. All of the books listed were tremendously insightful and I suggest you purchase those you find most interesting so you can dig into more details on that specific topic.

Playing to strengths

“People are likely to do their very best when they have an opportunity to play to their strengths,” says Stuart Crabb, Facebook’s head of learning in a recent Chief Learning Officer magazine article titled Facebook ‘Likes’ Learning. Author Dan Pink brought that up a few years ago in his great book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need when he said that successful people focused on their strengths and managed their weaknesses, rather than spending valuable time trying to improve their weaknesses. 

Crabb feels that determining an employee's ability and performance potential the way traditional learning does - via competency, is incorrect. According to Crab, “It’s actually a fairly flawed assumption because a focus on competency-based thinking excludes the emotional component that’s present in every task and activity: How does this work make me feel? What’s really important is recognizing that meaningful work — and engagement — is likely to come when managers find a way to tilt the job and the opportunities in the organizations to the strengths of the individual.”