An example of a teaching story

I recently write a hub about using teaching stories as selling tools. Of course teaching stories may be used for any purpose when you are persuading people to change their behavior.

Teaching stories affect people deeply and are remembered for a long time. Therefore it's good to have many teaching stories available to use appropriately.

Since teaching stories work on multiple levels (conscious/unconscious) it is important to just tell the story without any explanation or discussion (unless you are teaching people how and when to use teaching stories and metaphors).

Here’s a short true teaching stories from the field of software engineering. In 1984 a brand new fighter jet was designed. This was one of the first planes with full fly by wire (no hydraulic controls) to be designed.

The first prototype was ready. It had cost more than eighty million dollars to build (in 1984 dollars when the dollar was still worth something). The test pilot climbed into the cockpit and started going through his checklist.

One of his first tasks was to take the wheels up. There are hydraulic interlocks which stop the wheels going up when the plane is parked, or taxiing or otherwise is not flying. The test pilot pressed the wheels up button expecting nothing to happen other than a warning light to come up.

Surprise, surprise, the wheels went up, the prototype crashed on the ground causing more than two million dollars of damage and even more importantly the project was delayed by four months…

What had happened is that the software engineer had forgotten to test the weight on wheels microswitch….

Please leave comments on how this story affected you.