Learn SMARTER

You’re running a communication skills workshop and ask for a volunteer to practice a difficult conversation in front of the group.

You know they are capable of doing so, but there is a dead silence. No one makes eye contact.

After an awkward 20 seconds, you move on without a volunteer.

Practicing skills in a group setting is powerful yet vulnerable. You know participants are competent, and yet there is silence. Chances are high that they do not feel safe enough to step out of their comfort zone. There might also be a lack of motivation hindering participation.

Creating emotional safety is your priority. You would also influence participants’ motivation by giving a sense of autonomy (how much choice do they have in how the practice is set up?) and fostering relatedness with the group so that they don’t feel alone.

You’re presenting a very detailed overview of a new framework. Around minute 15, you notice half the group has checked out, staring blankly, one person is doodling.

The level of detail, combined with novelty, taxes our brains a lot. Try to reduce the thinking load. Decide what a ‘must-know’ is and what a ‘nice-to-know’ is for your participants in this stage. If it is not essential, leave it out or move that content to an annex.

On top of that, it is smart to use spaced repetition, since spacing out content gives your brain the opportunity to digest it.

You deliver a successful one-day training on project management methodology. Participants score well on the end-of-day test.

One week later, you send a follow-up quiz, and scores have dropped dramatically. Several participants emailed: “I honestly can’t remember the key steps anymore.”

Participants scored well on the test at the end of the day. Their attention, motivation, and thinking load are not the issue. The fact that humans forget is a natural process. Fight against forgetting by building retrieval practices during and after the learning event. Spaced repetition (spacing out learning over time) also supports long-term memory.

Ideally, your participants have a concrete project management assignment on their table when participating in your learning event. They can use it as a case in the training. Alternatively, they start their assignment immediately after the training. Immediate application is the best way to avoid forgetting.

You’re facilitating a mandatory compliance training. The energy is low from the start. Participants hang in chairs, give minimal responses and hardly contribute any ideas during discussions. Their body language screams “I don’t want to be here.”

One person mutters, “Can’t we just read this ourselves?”

Compare compliance training to eating Brussels sprouts: even though they are very healthy, most people don’t like them. This scenario illustrates a motivation issue. Often, these trainings are perceived as boring, not urgent, and not immediately relevant.

Make your participants care and influence motivation. Why is it on the agenda? Why is it important for them? What benefits are there for participants? You might also want to think about how you design your session to pique curiosity.

You’ve trained a customer service team on handling three types of complaints using separate practice sessions: one session on refunds, one session on technical issues, one session on shipping problems. Participants feel confident and perform well in each practice block.

Two weeks later, when real mixed complaints come in, they struggle to identify which approach to use and make frequent mistakes.

In real life, problems do not come in separate boxes. Prepare participants to discriminate which approach is best, given the context of the customer complaint, by mixing up practice sessions.

Revisiting, better known as interleaving, helps your participants to prepare for the messy reality.

At the start of a workshop, you take sufficient time to introduce yourself, your background, certifications, and a list of all relevant experiences related to the topic. You take several minutes to do this because you think it makes you seem more trustworthy as an expert.

By the end of the lengthy introduction, you notice that participants are distracted and on their phones.

Even though you might want to demonstrate your credibility to create trust, lengthy introductions are killing participants’ attention and motivation. Keep your biography ultra short. It’s not about you, but about how to make participants care.

Hook their attention from the first minute and make them care.

You read the text on your slides aloud. Slide after slide. At the end of slide 6, you suddenly ask participants a question.

Only a handful of participants heard your question. The majority have their eyes locked on the slides.

Don’t read the text on your slide aloud. Our brain processes the stimuli as a one-way street: either we listen, OR we read. We cannot process both simultaneously with the same level of attention. Reading slides out loud creates too much cognitive load and diffuses attention.

Make a choice; either let the participants read the text in silence first and only then verbally elaborate on it (you might want to announce why you are silent, not to come across weird). Alternatively, share your story first, and only afterward, show your slide.

During an onboarding training, new hires learn the procedure for requesting time off for exceptional circumstances such as parental leave. After that session, they don’t hear about it anymore.

Later, when they want to request this type of leave the first time, they need to ask HR again or reread the entire manual as they seem to have forgotten it.

“Use it or lose it” describes what is happening here. Without retrieval practices, participants’ memories of what they learned will fade. You can either build recall activities into the training to keep the insights top of mind.

Or, even better, you might want to create support participants can use ‘in the moment of need.’ Consider creating performance support materials, such as infographics, microlearning, FAQ pages, etc.

You run a mandatory online course about phishing. Participants receive no explanation of why it matters to their jobs, and their manager shows no interest. Most people click through the modules quickly, guess the quiz answers, and close the window as soon as it shows “completed.”

The number of phishing incidents is going up.

Make people care and boost participants’ motivation. Even though most of us are aware of the harm phishing can cause, mandatory courses on the topic might not be on top of the priority list. Opening with why it is important to both participants and the organization is crucial. Avoid vague or non-relatable rational explanations. Instead, go for real stories that trigger emotions.

On top of that, involve participants’ leaders. They have a huge influence on participants’ motivation and transfer to the workplace by expressing their importance and support.

In a classroom training, led by your best expert, the trainer teaches an 80-minute course using PowerPoint with small text and no breaks as time is ticking. The expert is convinced everything is important.

After 20 minutes, participants look at their laptops or just copy notes, but they can’t repeat what was just explained.

The expert might be suffering from the ‘Curse of knowledge.’ The more expertise you have, the harder it is to remember what it is like not to know. Reduce thinking load by determining what is most important to master right now and which parts can wait. Additionally, advise the trainer to limit the amount of text in the PowerPoint.

To reduce thinking load and improve attention, take regular breaks or change the learning approach every 20 minutes. Pull in your audience: ask a question, share a story, discuss a real dilemma.

In a “lessons learned” session, the project lead asks people to share mistakes from the last project. In an earlier workshop, mistakes were judged. Participants felt stupid.

In this session, no one dares to share concrete examples. Participants stay vague (“Communication could be better”), and real causes stay hidden.

Participants do not feel emotionally safe speaking up, being vulnerable, and sharing mistakes given their experience in the previous workshop. If we feel there might be consequences in speaking up, we tend not to share or stay vague.

In this case, you need to restore emotional safety. You can start by admitting that what happened in the previous workshop was not ok and taking responsibility for it. To restore trust, you can kick off by sharing your own mistakes you made in this project, how you felt about it, and what you learned from it. Stay curious about participants’ input and focus on learning insights instead of judgment.

You run a one-day leadership workshop full of great discussions and exercises. After the session, there is no follow-up: no recap emails, no short refreshers, no later touchpoints.

Three months later, you notice leaders are showing exactly the same old behaviours. In a pulse survey, they write: “That workshop was interesting.”

There was no lack of motivation, attention, thinking load, or emotional safety during the workshop. However, this workshop was a ‘one-time event’. Without active follow-up or application in the workflow, we forget what we learned, and the motivation that drives willingness to keep on going drops.

To build that muscle towards changing behaviour, it is smart to use participants’ own cases in the discussions and practices during the workshop. Actively using retrieval practices helps them to remember. Even better: let them apply the new skills in the workflow asap. Revisiting (or interleaving) prepares participants to cope with the complexity of leadership. Last but not least: provide follow-up and support to boost motivation through a supportive conversation with their own leader, a buddy, a mentor, or a post-meeting with fellow participants…

Employees are enrolled in a negotiation skills course chosen by HR. In the kick-off, you present learning goals and a tight agenda. You don’t ask what situations they struggle with or what they hope to improve.

During the exercises, participants stay superficial, joke around and say: “In my job I do things differently.”

After the training, nothing changes in their behaviour.

Participants show resistance because they do not feel heard. Boost their motivation by giving a sense of autonomy in the workshop. You might want to give them permission to decide on the key learning points or the learning activities.

Secondly, find the sweet spot of appropriate competence so that participants feel they can still learn new skills useful for their daily jobs. Like the Theory of Flow (Csikszentmihalyi), if the workshop is too easy, participants are bored and check out. When too complex, they will stress out and check out as well.

Thirdly: what can you do to feed a sense of belonging, demonstrating that you actually care about the participants’ learning needs rather than dumping one-way learning goals and agendas?

In a live demo of a new software tool, the trainer enthusiastically shows all 10 main features in one go: switching screens quickly, opening menus, explaining shortcuts, and jumping back and forth.

After the demo, someone asks: “Can you show again how to do the one thing we actually need next week?”

Most participants feel overwhelmed and only remember: “It looked complicated.”

Reduce thinking (cognitive) load. By deciding what a ‘must-know’ versus a ‘nice to know’ is in this stage of learning, you only focus on the must-know now. Take your time when switching screens and explain what you do and why at a moderate tempo.

You might want to spread out learning and build in repetition (spaced repetition) to beat cognitive overload. Performance support, helping participants in the moment of need, is not a luxury in this case.

In a language course, learners spend 1 week on business vocabulary, then 1 week on grammar, then 1 week on phrases.

In a mixed conversation practice, they use formal vocabulary with colleagues and casual grammar with clients.

Real-life interactions with clients always happen in a specific context. And context drives desired behavior. By weaving in revisiting (also known as ‘interleaving’) activities in your workshops, participants learn to discriminate the appropriate language depending on the context.

This helps them to decide when to use formal or informal language depending on the situation.