Summary

Training is often ineffective for creating behavior change or improving work performance.

• Human beings are forgetful creatures and forget 50% of what they've learned within 20 minutes.

• One-and-done training programs fall prey to the forgetting curve, and learning is a process, not an event.

• Bite-sized learning content that people can consume at their points of need is a more effective approach.

• Spacing out learning over time and repeating and reinforcing concepts are also helpful strategies.

• Revisit insecurities about designing a spaced out learning journey with pragmatism. Consider the motivation to learn as an ingredient for learning. The opportunity to apply learning at work is a catalyst for learning.

Ever since I started writing about asynchronous work, and particularly ever since I announced my book, people have asked me to conduct training about it. And I’ve resisted. I’ll come to the specifics of this decision by the end of this article, but here’s the fact of the matter. The Harvard Business Review tells us that most corporate training is ineffective. We spend countless hours designing and then delivering training. People often rate these programs highly. Yet, for behaviour change or performance at work, there’s rarely much to write home about. 

The trouble is that often when we wish to see a change in our workplaces; we reach for training as a solution. If we don’t our managers do. Even if managers don’t advocate for training, your people ask for it. This is although the corporate world wastes billions on pointless instruction. Of course, we believe that the training we design will be different. Even though most training doesn’t affect real-world performance, we will succeed. In the words of Daniel Kahneman, this amounts to delusional optimism and base-rate neglect. 

Having spent several years of my career designing training solutions, and having failed as much as I’ve succeeded, I’ve learned a few things. In today’s post, I want to share those epiphanies with you. If anything, the next time you think of training as a solution to a performance problem, you’ll have a nuanced perspective. 

Forgetfulness is your foe

First things first. Human beings are forgetful creatures. We forget three things every day! Here’s the biology you’re up against. 

• Within 20 minutes, you forget 50% of what you’ve learned.

• After a day, you forget 70% of it. 

• A month later the losses are at 80%.

We’ve known this since the 19th century, thanks to the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Of course, there are exceptions to the forgetting curve, but you don’t base your plans on exceptions, do you? 

A one-day or weekend workshop is easy to organise. You get people together for a contiguous block of time. Find yourself a charismatic presenter. Design a few fun instructional activities for the session. Get great feedback. Six points in a song. Bob’s your uncle. Except, if you follow this approach, you fall prey to the forgetting curve.

The rational response to this biological conspiracy is to avoid one-and-done training programs. Just like communication, learning is a process, not an event. Think about the journey of learning instead of trying to curate one impressive event.

Learning in the flow of work

When we submit to the reality of the forgetting curve, we can reflect on how we learn things outside work. Hark back to those days of the pandemic. Maybe you had a few extra hours up your sleeve to learn how to cook something. It’s unlikely that you attended a full-blown training program for every possible recipe of a certain cuisine. Instead, you may have looked up a recipe on video or using Google. Some of us may have even placed our phones in the kitchen and followed the recipe video step by step, pausing it or speeding it up when we had to.

Regardless of the specific thing you learned, the point I’m trying to make is that in our personal lives, we learn many things at the point of need. And we rarely front-load our brains with heaps of information. Let’s take another example. I’m trying to learn Swahili. There’s only so much I can learn alongside a full-time job and a book project. So I’ve set aside a few minutes each day to learn the language. At the time of writing this piece, it’s been 472 days of learning. On the trot. As a result, I’ve built up a vocabulary of about a thousand Swahili words.

This brings me to another point. Learning a new skill takes time. Mastery takes even longer. People need a variety of resources through this journey. Effective learning design takes this into account. Here are some strategies I recommend, instead of, or besides the stock-standard training workshops you may conduct.

1. Create or curate bite-sized learning content that people can consume at their points of need. Focus on simulations, how-tos and checklists. When you guide people through a real-world problem, you increase their ability to recall their skills and knowledge.

2. Space out your learning interventions. Introduce learning materials over time as part of a learning journey.

3. If forgetting is your foe, redundancy and repetition are your friends. When you space out learning resources, don't be fearful of repeating and reinforcing concepts. The more we repeat something, the more we remember it. You know this from school, don’t you?

Avoid insecure design decisions

Designing a spaced-out learning journey is not trivial. There are many challenges. People drop off midway. You can’t control if people will access the resources you create. Tracking your program’s effectiveness is also harder than just administering a survey at the end of a workshop.

Let me just say that we must get over these insecurities. We must revisit our concerns with a sense of pragmatism.

1. If people don’t consume the self-paced resources you create, it could mean that they’re not motivated to learn. Without drive, it’s unlikely they’ll learn anything, even if you hold them captive in a full-day workshop.

2. If people don’t follow through with the learning journey, it’s likely they’re not getting opportunities to apply the learning at work. Life and work take over and this is OK. Why should anyone learn something that they won’t apply? If your materials are indeed useful, people will learn when they’re ready. 

3. If your management still wants people to learn, guess what they must do? They must create opportunities to apply learning at work. Too often we try to solve problems through training, while the proper solution is a systemic fix at the workplace. When people have to scratch a real itch, they’ll take to learning more readily. 

4. It’ll take you time to showcase the impact of your spaced-out program, but that shouldn’t stop you from collecting the same reaction metrics for each resource. This is like the reactions you gather at the end of a workshop. Except, they’re more lightweight. You should also collect other leading metrics that suggest you’re headed in the right direction. With a one-and-done workshop approach, you exit the game too early. With a spaced-out approach, you can be in it till a logical conclusion.

Crafting a spaced-out learning journey doesn’t give us the ego boost that a room or Zoom full of workshop participants does. But if it’s recall and effectiveness you’re after, you need a different approach. 

If you must train, take a blended approach

Workshops are not undesirable. In fact, in certain situations, they work well. In my experience though, effective workshops blend synchronous and asynchronous learning. For example, I run a boot camp for all business analysts and product managers who join our company. It has two parts to it. 

1. Asynchronous self-study materials on Google Classroom.

2. Synchronous sessions on Zoom.

Here’s why this approach has worked for us. When you make lectures self-paced, people can take as much time as they need to absorb the concepts. Participants of our boot camp consume all the theory using the materials on Google Classroom. They often have small assignments to complete a day before they encounter the same concepts in the synchronous sessions. This preparation allows them to engage in close-to-real-world simulations and challenges in the synchronous sessions. We reduce Zoom fatigue and everyone wins. Moreover, the asynchronous materials are available to people as a reference throughout their Thoughtworks careers. They can use them at their points of need as a refresher.

There’s also an underrated benefit to making lectures asynchronous. Not everyone is a charismatic presenter. Live presentations also take longer than their recorded counterparts. By creating once and sharing many times, you take charisma out of the equation for making your workshop successful. All you need are subject matter experts (SMEs) who can support the exercises you’ve crafted. They need facilitation skills, not charisma.

So the next time you’re designing a workshop, think about how you can take a blended approach. Not only will you make your sessions action-oriented, but you’ll also put some onus of learning back on your participants. 

Information in context trumps instruction out of context

This article would be incomplete if I didn’t acknowledge the elephant in the room. Most SMEs who design workshops don’t think of themselves as content creators. They’re more comfortable in “sage on the stage” mode than trying to craft self-paced materials. I also admit that it’s more seductive to interact with an expert in real time than to consume their materials in our own time. Seductiveness and effectiveness are not the same thing though.

What you’ll notice is that the production value of content is far less important than the context in which we consume it. Of course, we all love a super-slick YouTube video with many funky animations and camera tricks. But beyond a point, you face the law of diminishing returns. You get most value from just paying heed to the basics. 

• When you write, keep things short. Write in plain English. Make your writing easy to scan. 

• If you record a video, be sure to have good audio and a sharp script. 

• If you design a quiz or a simulation, have it model real life as much as possible. 

None of these basics is rocket science to figure out. As you get better, you’ll inevitably layer on the fancy stuff. But don’t let the bells and whistles or your unfamiliarity with them stop you from doing the basics right. By creating useful, in-context information for your colleagues, you’ll do them far greater service than by just creating an out-of-context, instructional experience. 

So why haven’t I created a training workshop on asynchronous collaboration? If everything I’ve written hasn’t answered that question, let me share a few parting thoughts. For me, workshops are effective when they allow their participants to practise real-world activities in a safe space. The real-world activity for asynchronous collaboration is to make meetings the last resort. A workshop is a meeting after all. How does one call people to a meeting to teach them how to not have meetings? That’d be rather ironic, wouldn’t it?

Now that doesn’t mean that I’ll never create training content about asynchronous collaboration. At this point, the book is taking up all my cognitive surplus. When I have some space to design new materials, I’ll take a crack at a self-paced online program. And if that course comes to life, you will know. In the meantime, I continue to accept speaking engagements and offer live talks. I promise to create online versions of each of these talks for you to view at your convenience. Speaking of recordings, let me sign off by sharing my latest talk about “Async-first leadership.”