WINNING WORDS: THE POWER OF STORYTELLING Memory is not a passive recording device; it is selective, reconstructive and deeply influenced by relevance, emotion and meaning – that’s why storytelling is such a valuable learning technique, says David Oxley
T alking to a frustrated “You’ve got to start with the customer and work backwards.” A cursory glance at YouTube is enough to remind us of his legacy: product launches that felt like theatre; commencement speeches that sounded more like fireside chats than lectures; lessons wrapped in narrative, humour and vulnerability. When I look back over more than 40 years spent in both academia and business, the lessons that have stayed with me are not equations, frameworks or bullet points. They are stories, anecdotes and metaphors. In India, a leader once told me about a village chief who had been navigating what amounted to a mutiny after a devastating drought. The story was not really about water scarcity; it was about trust, legitimacy and listening when authority alone no longer works. When I reminisce about business school, I don’t think of case notes or slides. Instead, my thoughts turn to the professor who punctuated his teaching with a tale about his father, a formidable man whose machismo dissolved as they faced the final days of his battle with cancer. Now contrast this with the typical corporate training course or lecture hall experience, where engineer who was busy perfecting a product for which nobody had yet asked, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs declared,
information is delivered efficiently and methodically but often painfully. Do I remember the statistics lecture I attended in 1981? Only that it was mind‑numbing, mandatory and soon forgotten. Do I recall the assigned reading for my doctoral research in 2015? Only in as far as it reliably put me to sleep. The research into lecture-based learning is sobering. Cognitive psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus demonstrated that without reinforcement, newly learned information fades rapidly. His work on what became known as the ‘forgetting curve’ shows that learners can forget most new material within days. Research on the related ‘spacing effect’ also shows that learning is far more durable when tied to meaningful contexts. STORYTELLING AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON Long before formal education systems, humans passed on knowledge through narrative. Religion, epic poetry such as The Odyssey , Greek theatre and Shakespeare all encoded cultural values, warnings and wisdom in stories memorable enough to survive centuries. These narratives endured not simply because they entertained, but because they embedded meaning. We speak casually of Jekyll-and-Hyde personalities or Frankenstein moments,
often without having read the original texts. These stories function as shared cognitive shortcuts. They shape how we interpret behaviour and events. There is a neurological reason for this. Research into storytelling and learning shows that narratives activate multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, including those responsible for language, sensory processing and emotion. When emotional engagement is present, memory consolidation improves. Stories help learners organise information into coherent structures, making subsequent recall easier. THE IMPATIENCE OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION This is even more important today, given that Gen Z has grown up in a world where the internet, smartphones and video are not innovations but infrastructure. They have also grown up with blurred boundaries between education and entertainment, learning and play. YouTube tutorials, podcasts and interactive media have all shaped their expectations. The point is not that younger people learn differently in some biologically distinct way. It is that they are more willing to challenge systems that are simply not very effective. Research into modern instructional design shows that short, contextual and story-driven learning formats, often referred to as microlearning, improve engagement
36 Business Impact • ISSUE 1 • 2026
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