In the era of dispersed teams and knowledge-intensive industries, storytelling emerges as a potent tool for vicarious learning—learning from the experiences of others.
Vicarious learning, that is, learning from the experiences of others in the organization, including your peers, has always been a vital component of collective learning in any organization. Traditionally, vicarious learning was achieved through direct observation or formal knowledge transfer opportunities. However, these learning strategies are disappearing in the knowledge-intensive industries of today, where work is more ambiguous and less observable.
A Johns Hopkins study of air medical transport teams reveals a powerful new strategy for spreading vicarious knowledge within the constraints of today’s workplace: storytelling.
The study by Johns Hopkins professor Christopher Myers was based on hundreds of hours of observation and interviews with 19 members of a pseudonymously identified medical transport group called AirMedPro attached to a large university hospital. The transport group consisted of crews of two flight nurses and a pilot transporting severely injured or ill patients by helicopter from smaller hospitals to large hospital centers or from the scene of injuries to a hospital. The group transported approximately 1300 cases annually, with patients ranging from newborns to the elderly. The crews were fluid that is, the nurses did not always fly with the same second nurse, and the nurses rotated among AirMedPro’s two bases of operations, one at the university hospital and one at a smaller hospital 30 miles away. In the context of a medical staff operating separately in two-person teams, the hospital-setting opportunities for vicarious learning disappear.
The solution, according to the study: is storytelling. Through his observations and interviews, Myers was able to document how AirMedPro’s flight nurses used storytelling to expand others’ knowledge by recounting their experiences on their shifts. The opportunities for storytelling arose when nurses on the same shift were having breakfast or during downtime between calls, during the changing of the shifts, when the outgoing nurses would describe interesting events that occurred during their shifts.
In analyzing his observation notes and interviews, Myers discerned a three-stop process in the crews’ storytelling:
Triggering. The telling of a story could be triggered in different ways. One common trigger was the medical chart that gave details of the patient’s injuries or illness and the medical team’s response. Although the chart described what happened, it did not describe why the nurses made the decisions they did. Thus, a nurse reading the chart would want to hear more details about an incident that, for example, they might ad encountered themselves.
Telling. Myers found that the telling of stories followed certain norms and practices, such as an appropriate time and place for storytelling. Storytelling did not occur during the transport themselves, for example, as the focus had to remain on the patient’s condition. Another norm was the importance of telling stories with bad outcomes since nurses felt responsible for helping others avoid any mistakes that had occurred. Finally, while feedback on stories was welcomed, second-guessing or Monday-morning quarterbacking was not. That accepted attitude was not “What were you thinking?”, but rather, “I see you decided to do this, was there a reason why?”
Transforming. Stories are not simply told; they have to be transformed into prospective knowledge and future responses. For example, nurses used the stories to expand on which tools or techniques they might apply to a situation in the future. Discussing the stories in detail, including asking the storyteller questions or comparing the actions in a story with how they handled the same situation in the past, also helped transform stories into learning opportunities. Finally, telling the story of an event was a chance for storytellers to “debrief” themselves for example, getting feedback on what they could have maybe done better in the situation.
This detailed case study of the AirMedPro medical transport group offers clear proof of the power of storytelling in expanding vicarious learning in organizations where such learning is difficult to acquire. The study also shows how structures and processes at AirMedPro enabled such storytelling-based learning to take place and scaled the lessons from the stories.
Enabling structures and processes included:
Scaling structures and processes from individual to collective learning included:
Realistic training scenarios with human patient simulators, which recreated in detail the situations recounted in the stories, allowed all nurses to practice responding to the situations depicted.
Christopher G. Myer’s profile at Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business
https://carey.jhu.edu/faculty/faculty-directory/christopher-myers-phd
Storytelling as a Tool for Vicarious Learning among Air Medical Transport Crews. Christopher G. Myers. Administrative Science Quarterly (June 2022).
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00018392211058426
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