For this exercise you will need:

• A learning need for your team
• Physical access to a compelling story site
• Time and resources to manage an immersive event

I'm standing in the middle of the campus at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with the executive team of one of the most successful software innovators in Silicon Valley.

“Over the next two days,” I tell the team, “I want you to make a note of anything you see that you think helps to create a culture of high performance.” Some of the executives are already happily distracted as they raise their camera phones to capture pictures of passing Olympic and Paralympic athletes. “Capture notes of anything that grabs your interest,”I tell them. “It might be a technology you see. It might be a conversation with an athlete. It might be a symbol, a color, or a feeling. It might be the architecture. Anything is fair game. At this point, you don't have to know why it is important. Later, we will explore your observations to tease out something that will be valuable to your work.”

This has become a familiar refrain in the immersive leadership experiences presented with my friends and colleagues at The Conference Board. With my friend and longtime mentor, Dick Richardson, we invite teams of leaders to step into some of the most compelling stories in the world—be it through the stories of the Apollo program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Johnson Space Center in Houston; the Battle of Gettysburg at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania; D-day at Normandy, France; and more.

These experiences are fascinating because they manifest physically the dynamic that takes place every time we hear a story. After all, neuroscience shows us that when we listen to a story, our minds process it as if it were a real experience. So what happens when we bodily step into a fantastic, compelling story? Our belief at The Conference Board was that it would lead to even higher levels of engagement in learning that can be lasting and transformative. We found that to be true.

Creativity theorist Edward de Bono coined the term lateral leaps to describe the mental process of connecting two previously unlinked ideas in the mind. This is the unique power of story field trips. They are data-rich environments that continue to generate value-producing lateral leaps of insight even after the event is long over.

As an act of learning design, this is serious work. My team, including Dick Richardson and Jeff Jackson, invested enormous resources into creating compelling story experiences that could lead to strategic dialogue and business transformation.

But you don't have to be a learning designer to create powerful story field trips. You are surrounded by accessible opportunities to step into a story with your team for powerful learning.

How to Step into a Story

To create an immersive story learning experience with your team, we will once again draw from Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, or monomyth (which is explored in Chapter 12.) From a design point of view, this makes sense because you are, after all, inviting your team into a dramatic journey of learning!

Your steps are to:

• Identify the special world (finding the context for learning).
• Issue the call to adventure (framing the conversation).
• Cross the threshold (immersing in the story).
• Bring back the elixir (drawing out the connections).

Identify the Special World

Let's begin with the most obvious question: Where will you take your team for the learning experience?

The best story field trips are in story-rich environments. That is, they are filled with history, dramatic tensions, and identifiable protagonists who experience clear arcs of change.

Additionally, they should feature some story delivery mechanism. Don't make the mistake of assuming that your team will naturally pick up the story simply by being present and walking through a site. There must be some vehicle for actually relaying the story to your team. This could be a person, such as a tour guide, historian, or docent like you might find at a museum or historic site, or an employee or leader at an organization you wish to visit. It could be printed materials, such as the signage and placards at a well-designed museum exhibit. Or it could be an audio or digital presentation, such as an audio tour available for rent at a museum or special smartphone tour guide applications that are becoming increasingly popular at historical sites.

Possibilities for story field trips may include:

• Different organizations or centers of expertise

  Tour an organization or facility that is renowned for excellence in some area. Is there a manufacturing facility with a reputation for efficiency? Is there a locally owned luxury hotel with a legacy of customer service? How about a new restaurant that is the latest offering of a local chef with a reputation for innovating? Is there a social enterprise in your town that is doing inspiring things through highly impassioned and values-driven leaders?

  My partners at INSEAD and CEDEP in Fontainebleau, France, are situated in a campus right next to horse stables on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, and they have seized the opportunity. The stables are a short walk from the campus, and my colleague Loic Sadoulet frequently pauses his executive development programs to walk over to hear stories from a “horse whisperer” and meet the stubborn horses who are transformed by his coaching. It is a powerful experience, Loic says. “The horse whisperer teaches the horse to relax when its world looks difficult and when instinct tells it to flee. The parallels between the effectiveness of the horse trainer and the effectiveness of leaders are wonderful.”

• Military sites or military museums

  Many people aren't crazy about war metaphors, but I nonetheless find these sites tend to be rich in high-stakes stories with great implications for strategy, planning, resource management, vision, and much, much more. Often, you can find historians for local battlefields who can tell you the fascinating details as you walk the hallowed grounds.

• Sites of historical significance

  You may have access to designated sites of political, civic, or cultural importance. These may include American Indian burial grounds, the state Capitol building, well-preserved plantation homes, monuments, architectural wonders, or other sites where something of historical or newsworthy significance happened.

  

  

• Cultural touchstones

  Museums, symphony orchestras, legendary performance venues, old churches, and more tend to be drenched in story. One story practitioner I know invites her teams to sit among the musicians of the 300-year-old Slovene Philharmonic Orchestra in Slovenia, where they have a uniquely immersive experience of the performance as well as an opportunity to hear stories about the institution's rich history directly from the conductor and musicians.

  

• Sport experiences

  These can be tricky. I've seen groups attempt to build a learning experience simply out of attending a hockey or football game, and come away disappointed. Yes, a baseball game is technically a self-contained story (with its own antagonist, protagonist, conflict, and so on) but it is a superficial one. Sport experiences work best when coupled with a behind-the-scenes view that is built on more robust stories. For example, you might access a coach, a team member, or even someone in the organization's leadership to serve as a storyteller who can provide a more complete narrative perspective on the people or events. At The Conference Board Team USA Leadership Development Experience, Olympic and Paralympic athletes, coaches, and leaders are the compelling storytellers who bring the experiences to life so that the program is about so much more than just sports.

  

  

Issue the Call to Adventure

How will you frame the experience to your people? What is this story experience about? Stories contain their own wisdom, so to an extent you should frame the journey as something that the story can deliver.

This requires a bit of listening. When Dick Richardson and I develop immersive experiences for The Conference Board, we begin with an extended period of story listening in which we look for the narrative wisdom that is already threaded through the story.

For example, we might have a difficult time making our program at the Olympic Training Center into a dialogue about, oh, say marketing and branding.¹ On the other hand, you might sense how the Olympic Training Center is perfect for hosting a dialogue around creating a high-performance organization.

Similarly, the Apollo Leadership Development Experience (at Johnson Space Center or Kennedy Space Center) is an ideal place to host a dialogue on leading teams for innovation.

With my partners at learning company Blueline Simulations, we sent a team of medical sales representatives to Disney World's Magic Kingdom for a program on exceptional customer experiences.

The idea is to frame the experience broadly in a way that draws out the natural wisdom of the story, while being relevant to the strategic conversation that is urgent for your team to have.

On the other hand, it may be that you are comfortable encountering the story experience with no agenda at all and minds wide open to emergent meaning. When my colleague first approached the Slovenian orchestra, she said, “We didn't know what the outcomes would be. We practiced presence and waited for the questions to emerge from the story.” When participants surrender themselves to the process of listening and learning, that itself becomes a part of the learning.

Note that when Dick and I have developed these immersive story experiences, they are often two and a half days and sometimes up to five days long. But that's in the service of a robust and carefully engineered set of learning objectives. For your team, we're seeking spontaneous and useful insights. A 2-hour to 4-hour immersion will be ample. For example, you might meet your team at the site in the morning for a 3-hour or 4-hour experience, go to lunch together afterward, and be back at work by 1 pm.

Let's quickly check off our to-do items:

• Find a story-rich environment to host your team.
• Identify a person or vehicle for telling the story to your team.
• Identify the broad theme that you are looking to explore from the site.

Of course, make any other plans (such as travel, lunch, and other expenses) for this to be a fun event!

You're ready to step into the story!

Cross the Threshold

Once you and your team cross the threshold into the special world of the story, it is important to foster two sets of awareness: one around the story you are encountering (listening “in the text”) and the other around value-producing insights (connecting “in front of the text”).

In Chapter 6, “Summoning the Muse,” we explored the value of giving audiences a special task or role to focus their attention as they receive the story. Remember, stories are incredibly rich containers of information, and audiences will find themselves adrift if you don't provide a frame to direct their attention.

This isn't hard to do. At the beginning of the experience, simply remind your team of the theme of the event. “We are here today to explore the topic of collaboration.”

Then, invite participants to think expansively, and capture details. “As you look around the facility, and as Mrs. Summers tells us the stories about how this company was built, make a note of anything you find interesting. It can be any part of the story—a detail, a quote, or something that just strikes you as unusual. At this point, you don't have to know why it is important. If it catches your interest, that's enough.”

That last sentence is important. Team members are only noticing, not connecting, at this point.

My colleague Terrence Gargiulo has success in having his participants be a little more exclusive in what they notice. He calls his events “Study Tours,” and he instructs his participants to observe just two or three interactions or pieces of data, and come back prepared to talk about them.

For The Conference Board experiences, we distribute Moleskine notebooks to each participant for note capture. The books are compact, and the beautiful design just seems to invite people to populate the pages with notes. They are ideal companions for these experiences.

We also hosted an innovation tour of Silicon Valley organizations in which we distributed iPads to each participant (on loan) and used a note-taking app that allowed participants to capture both handwritten notes and spontaneously captured photos on the same page.

At different points in the tour, it may be helpful to remind people to capture ideas. Sometimes, they become so immersed in the fascinating stories they forget to capture their notes.

But otherwise, stay immersed in the story! Avoid the temptation to interrupt with frequent connections to your business. Instead, capture the thought quietly so that you can come back to it later.

Bring Back the Elixir

Recall that the denouement of Campbell's Hero's Journey features a return with the elixir—the hard-won knowledge, insight, or item of value that has the power to transform the ordinary world. This is the goal of every learning journey.

As we have explored elsewhere in Circle of the 9 Muses, after you hear a story the conversation isn't over. It's just beginning! As a leader, you host additional conversations to begin drawing the meaning out of the story, making its value explicit and actionable.

Although the assistance of a trained facilitator can greatly enhance this conversation, you can exercise your leadership role as weaver of meaning simply by asking some basic questions:

• Draw out the data.

  What did you notice?

  What were some of the notes you captured in your Moleskine notebook or iPad?

  What jumped out at you as being significant or interesting?

• Connect it to the frame.

  We are here today to talk about the theme of [collaboration, or whatever]. How do you think that connects to our theme?

  (Note that some details may not be directly connected to the theme. That's okay. Allow for a broader interpretation. “Why else do you think that detail is important? What does it say to you about collaboration in general?”)

• Bridge it to your world.

  How might that idea/behavior/dynamic show up in our organization?

  Have you ever seen it in our work? Why or why not?

  How might that idea/behavior/dynamic be used to benefit us in our work?

• Ask for stories.

  Tell me about a time you saw something similar in our work. What happened?

  How was that different than what we saw today? How was it the same?

• Make plans for action.

  Based on what we just discussed, what needs to happen?

  What should we do differently? (Who should do it? By when?)

  If you wish, capture ideas on flip chart paper as you host this conversation. Be sure to capture and follow up on any insights and actions that this conversation generates.

The Stories Keep Working on You!

One of the curious effects of these immersive story experiences is that they keep working on you. The more compelling the story is, the more likely it is to continue percolating in your subconscious and generating invisible ripples of helpful disruption to your thought processes.

I keep thinking about the stories I've heard at the Olympic Training Center, and they return to my consciousness at the most interesting moments. I may be in the middle of a challenging piece of work, and something that a Paralympic swimmer said, or an encounter in the athlete dining hall, will suddenly flash in my mind.

Really great stories get inside of you, where they keep communicating and delivering their gifts.

Special thanks to my wonderful team at The Conference Board, including Jeff Jackson and Dick Richardson, as well as our partners James Sayno at the Olympic Training Center and Harv Hartman (retired), from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.