Using Narrative Structure to Improve Corporate Training

Gandalf the Grey from The Lord of the Rings stands on a stone path in the lush green hills of the Shire. Wearing his iconic pointed wizard hat and gray robes, he holds his wooden staff while overlooking the idyllic countryside. Sunlight breaks through clouds in the background, illuminating the pastoral landscape of rolling hills and distant fields that stretches toward the horizon. The scene captures Gandalf as the wise mentor figure at the beginning of the hero's journey.

The human brain sitting in your skull today didn’t evolve to process bullet points and data tables. It descended from ancestors who survived the harshest conditions on Earth without a single written manual. They passed critical knowledge from generation to generation through stories around fires, tales of where to find food, which plants could heal, and how to avoid danger.

As I often told my high school students: “The perfect brain for PowerPoint died in the Ice Age.”

Our neural architecture is wired for narrative. It’s why people will sit through a three-hour Marvel movie with a full bladder but struggle to stay awake through a ten-minute slide presentation. It’s why every major religious text consists primarily of stories rather than bulleted lists of commandments. And it’s why the most durable pieces of human knowledge are ancient tales that have survived millennia.

Yet somehow, when we design corporate training, we often ignore this fundamental truth about how humans learn.

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