Generic discussion on storytelling and compliance training

42 Teaching Minds science can tell something about how this process works. You can’t find an experience that was indexed wrong, for example. Good indexing involves figuring out the goal that an experience relates to and the conditions that allowed that goal to be achieved or not. We do not do this consciously. We learn by doing, that is, we learn from experience, and from thinking about those experiences. When we have understood our experiences well enough, we can (un- consciously) index them so that they will come up again just in time when we need them again. (This is what we call being reminded.) It is beyond the scope of this book to explain how that process works.? The simple idea is that experiences get labeled when we think about them and not otherwise. So the real question for an integrity and compliance officer is how to get people to think about integrity and compliance issues. This thinking needs be done over time in a complex way and voluntarily. How might we do that? That is the real question. One answer to this is stories. People really like stories. As long as there have been people, there have been stories; we have moved from epic poems and theatre to novels and movies in recent years, but, by and large, the stories are the same. How to overcome obstacles to get- ting what you want, is a theme that dominates much of literature, for example. Movie makers say it as “boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.” There have been many books written about the basic plots that occur again and again in stories. Human beings understand stories because stories resonate with them. Characters have dilemmas that readers or viewers themselves have had. Stories appeal to emotions rather than logic, and emo- tions are at the heart of our pre-7-year-old unconscious selves. We feel something because of a well-told story and that feeling can help us see something in a new way. Why am I going on and on about stories? I believe that all of human intercourse is about the exchange of stories. (I wrote a book about this.*) If you want to appeal to the pre-7-year-old unconscious that resides in all of us, you need to hit emotion not logic. This means that a good story can help someone to reconsider deep down in their unconscious a feeling or attitude or seemingly immutable personality trait that they can feel perhaps is somewhat dysfunctional. Stories can change our natural instincts. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023788