Every scenario must have a main character. As in life, it’s better if the main character has a goal. This goal drives the story.
All the actions and decisions in the scenario move you closer or further from that goal. This is one of the critical elements I mentioned last week. Protagonists should be like your learners:
- Protagonist or main character
- That character’s goal
- The challenges that character faces.
When you create characters for scenarios, you may actually need to identify several goals for them to work towards
Begin with the end in mind
This might seem back-to-front; we usually start at the beginning… “Once upon a time…
For learning scenarios, this is exactly what we need.
How will your scenario end? What do you want the character to do at the end of your story? How will it finish up?
It might help to think of the conclusion of your story in relation to your learning objectives:
- What do your learners need to be able to do at the end of the training?
- What skills do they need to demonstrate?
- What does success performance look like?
Successful performance is the goal or conclusion of the story in most scenarios. Meeting that goal is one of several endings to the story (and the consequences of failing to meet that goal are alternative endings).
Align learning objectives to character goals
As an example, say one objective is to “Provide maintenance teams quickly to emergency breakdowns with correct skills and equipment.”
What does that really mean for managers?
Think about the business need. A manager’s goal isn’t to fix the maintenance problem but to make sure they have skilled and well equipped teams to do the job.
Goals may be hidden
You might not ever specifically state the goal. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. You can sound a bit stiff and artificial if you do.
Most of the time, people don’t cheerfully voice their goals like Marie below:
“Hi I’m Marie, a manager of five maintenance teams. My job is to keep them productively ready to fix emergencies in our delivery system.”
Instead of telling your learners directly, try to show that goal through their actions, dialogue, and concerns. Marie, the manager, still has the same concerns and goal here in the second example. She wants her teams to be ready and productive and successful. She doesn’t say directly though. Instead of telling you her goal directly she’s showing you her goal through dialogue with another character. In this case, there’s a more specific goal for a project.
“We have an aggressive training schedule for the next two months. This is aligned with new monitoring equipment being installed in-line. I’m working with the team to make sure everybody is up to speed with maintenance requirements.”
You might not even show the goal as clearly as in that dialogue. It might only be revealed in the decisions that your characters make. It’s easy to see how a manager who’s worried about keeping a system working correctly at all times might be concerned about giving team members time off for new training. Actually, if that training or knowledge of new equipment will help the employee perform better, it would actually help the team meet the goal.
Maru requested a two-day training to learn about the new monitoring system. What should Marie do?
(a) Approve his request | (b) Talk to HR |
(c) Tell Maru he can’t take the training until the new budget year | (d) Review training policies |
Primary goals and Secondary goals
Marie’s primary goal is helping her teams be successful so they keep the big system running. That goal is still pretty far removed from the learning objective though. I’ll keep that primary motivation in mind while I write her character, but I need to have a secondary goal that ties to the course.
In this case, her secondary goal is to provide training for all teams on the new monitoring equipment. She might have an additional second goal of applying to HR for more training budget. I wouldn’t say that goal directly in the scenario, but the choices she makes (like consulting HR for help) would reflect that goal. In the last example above, delaying Maru’s training could violate HR’s policy. The consequences for making that choice would show how she didn’t achieve her goals.
Thinking of your character’s goal and motivation makes them more realistic, and it helps keep your scenarios moving towards those goals.