By Anya C. Gonzales, Marketing Associate at Jhana - Greatmanager

Description

Forget the Science of LearningTo Really Help People Learn, Focus on the Science of Forgetting

Ask any CEO if he or she wants to develop great leaders within the company, and the answer will, most likely, be yes.

Thats why many companies dish out millions of dollars each year for training and development, be it software skills, compliance or (my personal favorite) management training.

In fact, according to 2015s Training Industry Report, an annual survey conducted by Training Magazine, the amount of money U.S.

companies were planning to spend this year on outside training products and services skyrocketed 29 percent, from $6.1 billion to $8 billion .

(Those figures include annual spending on external vendors and consultants, including all products, services, technologies, off-the-shelf and custom content, and consulting services.) Interestingly enough, the companies surveyed invested between 37 and 54 percent of that total on instructor-led classroom sessions.

Thats a lot of money (and time spent in the classroom), but is it money well spent? Are companies actually helping their team members be more effective?


Instructor-led trainings fatal flaw

Instructor-led training is clearly popular in the corporate world, not to mention very expensive, but it may have a fatal flaw: so much of that instructor-led training is helping people remember as much as possible.

However, once your training ends, your trainees start to forget.

According to the organizational-development consultant and professor Art Kohn, Within one hour, people will have forgotten an average of 50 percent of the information you presented.

Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70 percent of new information, and within a week, forgetting claims an average of 90 percent of it.

This is what Kohn calls the forgetting curve:
how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it.

So, why do we forget? According to Julia Shaw, who wrote about the topic in September for Mind, a blog published by Scientific American, we can blame two phenomena: decay and interference.

Why we forget so much of what we learn
In decay, things that you learn grow dim over time because you dont access those particular memories.

So, for example, if you learn how to deal with change management from a change-management expert in January, but never need to tap into those skills until 3 months down the line, its highly likely that youll have forgotten most of the pertinent information or practical tips that you learned in your one-day training.

In interference, things that you learn are harder to recall because of interference, or even distortion, from similar information that you learned outside of your one-day training.

For example, say your instructor focused on negotiation skills in your session, and afterwards, you Googled how to negotiate.

Any new information that you pick up in your online search may, in effect, write over the information you learned in your training session, obscuring those memories.

And it makes sense. Think about it.

In college or high school, you had to study the material over and over again before the test to do well.

That hasnt changed now that youre an adult. And you have even less time now to practice skills you dont use every day.


What this means for management training

So how can L&D professionals use this knowledge to develop better managers?
Instead of focusing so much on making people remember, we should focus on how people forget, i.e.

the science of forgetting.

When we understand how adult learners forget, we can formulate programs that work with the learners brain instead of against it.

So, how can we do this? One way is to invest in bite-size learning: that is, offering nuggets of information that are practical, easy to digest in just a few minutes and accessible from anywhere even via ones phone.

In todays fast-paced workplace, this kind of on-demand learning makes sense.

Another strategy would be to design programs that allow team members to look up a particular piece of information when they need it.

Dont give a course on how to conduct 1-on-1s at the start of the year, only to discover, when performance-review season rolls around in December, that your companys managers are still struggling to do them well.

Instead, provide them with research-backed, peer-reviewed advice on 1-on-1s that they can access whenever they like. This reduces the chance of decay, because the person turns to the information as he or she needs it.

It also reduces interference, because the person can review the credible and valid material again and again until it sticks.

Even though instructor-led training is popular, it may not always be the best way to help managers learn.

Instead, develop learning strategies that aim to mitigate decay and interference and leverage what may be perceived as a weakness that is, our all-too-human tendency to forget.

We love helping managers learn, grow and develop.

Want to learn more about how we help managers develop into effective and engaging leaders? Check out our website here .

Jhana provides bite-sized learning for people leaders, helping them become more effective, engaging and impactful.
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