The Greatest Generation lost another one last week…(actually it lost a lot more than that but this one I knew)…in 2010 I was a guardian for an Honor Flight to DC. This is where we take WWII vets to DC to see their memorial etc. Quite a day…Imagine taking  bunch of 80-90 year old men on a field trip!

One of my men was John Dew. He fought in Europe after D-Day. Kind of ironic that he was buried last week on the same day I was at Omaha Beach. He was a fine man and he shared some wonderful stories with me on our trip. When we first got to the WWII memorial I could see him grow distant as he surveyed the rain soaked scene (I brought extra ponchos. No way my guys were going to have to miss anything because of rain!). I pushed his wheel chair into the memorial further and he looked up at me. I asked what he was thinking and he said, “I was just thinking of all those boys who never came home…” Later at the Air and Space Museum as we looked at vintage aircraft he remarked every morning seeing “hundreds of planes flying east to bomb Germany…….but then, in the afternoon, not as many planes flying back west.” Again, I could feel his sadness. There were other stories and in telling me he helped me learn a bit more about his experience and made me better/smarter for it.

As humans we learn a lot through story. You can use them to help your tenured folks transfer knowledge to the junior ones. As people retire, and many will be doing that in the coming years, we risk losing their knowledge. We also know that experience is the best teacher but we don’t have time to let up and comers get all the experience they need to be successful. But we can transfer some of that experience based learning by creating opportunities to tell a story. It isn’t as childish as it sounds. It is actually a best practice for transferring knowledge.

Ultimately we are talking about scenario based training but it all starts with a story that begins with “There once was a time…”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2012 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.