In a very interesting Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this morning, law professor Ann Althouse said of teaching to law students; "law is not abstract unless one makes the mistake of turning it into an abstraction." She went on to say; "Law should connect to the real world." What struck me is that this is too often exactly what we do with our "training" inside corporations. In an attempt to push as much learning and training out to the masses as we can, we make everything an abstraction. We take a set of real life experiences that have occurred where we want people to behave differently, and we convert the situations to bullet points or "nuggets." We then take the nuggets, place them in a pretty wrapper and load them on to our Learning Management Systems where we hope that someone will see them. Too often, this just doesn't happen. We started with the rich stories...the real world. So why make it abstract when you can keep it real? Hold the nuggets, I'll pass.