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Making Supply Chain Management Engaging
If you send your employees an email asking them to head to the conference room tomorrow morning to attend a training session on supply chain, you’ll likely get a tepid response and probably a few eye-rolling emojis sent back and forth between employees via their instant messenger as well. If you send out the same email telling your employees that they’re all heading to the conference room tomorrow for a beer game, you may need to get a few extra chairs to accommodate the rush of employees suddenly migrating down the hallway. Teaching Supply Chain management through storytelling is a way of correcting that imbalance.
The average employee isn’t particularly passionate about infrastructure, but understanding how a supply chain works can help everyone do their own job better. It also helps identify gaps in the process that can be plugged to maximize efficiency, minimize costs and keep operations running more smoothly.
People love a good story. It’s a great way to get them excited about a topic that takes them out of the dry classroom. And it puts them in the middle of a story that teaches them new information along the way.
The “Beer Game” is short for beer distribution game. It’s a simplified take on a new concept for teaching supply chain knowledge through fiction. By incorporating the fun factor that it’s about beer, it aims to more easily teach lessons about key components like collaboration, information sharing, and supply chain management in a format that most will quickly grasp.
The Power of Storytelling
For thousands of years, people have learned through storytelling. For example, our ancestors passed down their entire history before there were readily available methods for writing and preserving text. The power of a good story lies in its ability to connect the listener to the message it’s trying to convey. In this case, the basics of how a supply chain works and the most common problems that arise. Drawing a reader into the story creates familiarity and trust, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Elements such as suspense, action and thrills make the experience memorable for everyone involved. Because it allows them to apply what they learn to their own situation. This bridges the gap between fiction and supply chain understanding. Recall a special after school or a particularly themed television program you watched as a child. Think back to the impression you had of the show the first time you saw it. An impression strong enough it’s still memorable 10, 20, maybe even 50 years later! When a story is entertaining, time seems to pass more quickly. But the lessons you learn from it stick better and are easier to recall in the future.
At Kaleidoscope International we want to bring the supply chain to life, doing things like teaching supply chain management through storytelling is just one of the ways we do this. Learn more about what we do at: https://kaleidoscope-int.com/about-us/.