[acb-hsp] The Danger of Pasteurized Learning

[peter altschul]

The Dangers of Pasteurized Learning
  April 20, 2012 by David Rock
  I recently sat down with an executive from a Fortune 500 
financial services firm to talk about how they had built their 
leadership development curriculum.  "We created various levels of 
leadership within the organization," the executive said, bsuch as 
first time leaders, and leaders of leaders.  Then we planned a 
series of training programs for each level, identifying the big 
ideas that needed to be covered in each program, such as giving 
feedback or thinking strategically." Outside consultants were 
then brought in to work out the contents of each module.  Like 
many organizations pressed for time today, there was pressure to 
shorten everything.  Two days of training became one, which 
became a half-day, which then became a few hours.  These 
condensed modules were then packaged together into a two-day 
program.  "We basically pasteurized all the learning," the 
executive told me, shaking his head in disbelief.  They had taken 
all the goodness out.  With so many ideas packed into a short 
time, there was simply too much to digest.  The result? The 
needle wasn't moving on what employees were saying about their 
bosses, which is the only honest measure of whether a leadership 
program is working.
  This is not an isolated case.  Every week I speak to clients 
struggling under the pressure of teaching more, in less time, 
with shrinking budgets.  Unfortunately, there are no widely 
respected guidelines for how much you should teach people in a 
day, or how to be sure ideas will stick.  Many corporate training 
programs are the mental equivalent of trying to eat a week of 
meals in a day.
  The pressure on learning isn't going away any time soon, and 
allocating more time to training programs is rarely realistic.  
Instead, I think we need to better understand the processes 
involved in digesting learning, so that we can experiment and 
find faster "transmission speeds" for learning-the training 
program equivalent of going from the 56k modem to high-speed 
cable.
  Fresh thinking about how we learn There are two kinds of 
learning.  Learning physical tasks, like how to snowboard without 
bruising your buttocks or ego, is embedded through repetition in 
the deeper motor regions of the brain such as the basal ganglia.  
This is known as procedural memory.  Given that work today is 
more mental than physical, workplace learning now involves ideas 
that need to be mentally recalled, known as declarative memory.
  For workplace learning to be useful, we need to be able to 
recall ideas easily.
  There's no point learning a great new model for running a 
meeting if you can't remember the model easily on meeting with 
your team.  In order to recall information easily, we need to 
build a complex web of links across many parts of the brain.  
Picture a spider web, with the silk linking huge numbers of 
neurons right across the brain.  The more robust the web, in 
other words, the more nodes and links within an idea, the easier 
a memory can be recalled, because there are more ways in--comm 
entry points to the web.
  In the last decade, Neuroscientists discovered that whether an 
idea can be easily recalled is linked to the strength of 
activation of the hippocampus during a learning task.  The 
stronger the hippocampus fired up while learning something (which 
means the more oxygen and glucose it was using), the better 
people recalled that information later.
  With this finding, scientists such as Lila Davachi at NYU and 
others have been able to test out many variables involved in 
learning experiences, such as what happens to the hippocampus if 
you distract people while absorbing information.
  There are many different intriguing findings emerging, and I 
decided to see if these could be chunked into a framework that 
could be recalled easily (chunking ideas is a useful tool for 
effective recall).  Over a few months of collaboration, Lila 
Davachi and I, along with Tobias Keifer, a consultant from Booz 
and Co., found a useful pattern that summarized the four biggest 
factors that determined the quality of recall.  These are 
Attention, Generation, Emotion and Spacing, or the "AGES" model.  
The AGES model was first presented at the 2010 NeuroLeadership 
Summit, and then published in the 2010 NeuroLeadership Journal.  
Below is a summary of the key ideas in that paper.
  Learning that lasts through AGES Attention is about how much 
people are focused in the moment on a particular learning task.
  This is no small matter in an era with ever shrinking attention 
spans.  You get dramatic drop off in memory simply by diverting 
people's attention with a secondary media, like another screen on 
while focusing on a memory task.  We need people's full attention 
during learning -- yet that is getting much harder with the 
prevalence of always-on devices.  Even webinars have their flaws 
-- people can be easily distracted from the core idea by all the 
bells and whistles of the technology.  To speed up learning we 
need to focus more on, well, focus.  The research is clear that 
even tiny distractions during a learning task take a big toll on 
later recall of ideas.  Yet we seem to be going in the other 
direction, giving people so many things to focus on all at once 
in learning environments, to try to make learning as "rich" as 
being online.  Rich, deep focus is a critical factor for 
learning, and anything that gets in the way of this focus needs 
to be removed if you want people to recall ideas later.
  Generation means that people need to be making their own 
meaning, literally generating their own links, not just passively 
listening to ideas.  We need our own brain to create rich webs of 
links to any new concept, linking ideas into many parts of the 
brain.  Using many different types of neural circuitry to link to 
an idea is the key, meaning we should be listening, speaking, 
thinking, writing, speaking, and other tasks about any important 
idea.  This takes time and effort and can't be rushed.  A quiet 
mind, not a rushed one, sees subtle links, as many studies show.  
And we often generate ideas in dialogue with others, not just 
alone.  These conversations take time, time that is being 
stripped out of classrooms.
  Good levels of Emotions are also necessary for embedding 
learning.  The stronger the emotions people feel while learning, 
the better they can recall information later.  Strong emotions 
can be either positive or negative emotions.  Negative emotions 
like learning anxiety are easier to activate in people, because 
of the brainbs basic physiology where bad is stronger than good.  
Yet overly strong emotions can shut down learning altogether.  
Building positive emotions requires time and space, and usually 
involves human interactions, as social rewards tend to be the 
strongest.  In some classrooms there is no time for emotion, 
there is just too much material to get through.
  Spacing is the surprising finding.  We tend to predict that 
learning in a block will be better for recall.  This turns out to 
be true, but only if you need to remember something for a short 
time, such as for an exam the next day.  (This is technically 
known as the "massing" effect.) Long term recall is far better 
when we learn information over several sittings.  Any amount of 
spacing appears to help a lot.  Counter-intuitively, the longer 
we need to remember information, the more the learning should be 
spaced out.  Clearly we're not taking advantage of spacing in the 
current design of most training programs.
  Rethinking learning The AGES model is a template for designing 
more effective learning experiences.
  Firstly, we need people to focus intensely to learn, with no 
distractions at all.  Realistically, this probably works better 
in small bites given how busy we all are.  How can anyone focus 
intensely for days on end with so many emails are piling up? 
Secondly, people need to make their own connections to ideas, 
which happens more easily in unrushed conversations or 
activities.  Third, we need emotions present for learning, though 
preferably a good balance of positive and negative emotions.  And 
finally, we should be spacing out learning, giving people the 
chance to reactivate ideas regularly over time.
  While these four variables sound challenging, they actually 
open up interesting possibilities for significant efficiency 
increases, and dramatic cost savings too.  One project I was 
involved with taught 3,000 leaders over 64 countries how to be 
better workplace coaches.  The training program was delivered in 
six one-hour bites in small groups over 6 weeks, with no one 
traveling.  It was executed by the old fashioned telephone (on 
phone bridges).  The training program, despite being telephone 
based, focused people's attention through specific telephone 
techniques, modeling a high-energy radio show, but with everyone 
participating.  It had people generate their own connections 
through specific exercises between calls.  It had high emotion as 
a result of calling on people to participate throughout the 
sessions, and had significant spacing of ideas, with what would 
have been a two-day training program spread over 6 weeks.
  Virtually everyone before the program predicted this approach 
wouldn't work for them.  Afterward, 92% of 150 participants 
randomly surveyed said the experience was very effective or 
effective for them.  Real learning occurred, at dramatically 
lower cost for this organization.  It turns out that many of our 
intuitive hunches about the brain and learning are wrong.
  It has never been more urgent that we improve the effectiveness 
of teams and management, yet much of our approach to embedding 
learning hasn't been updated for decades.  This new research 
about the real conditions necessary for long term memories 
provides a framework for both tweaking existing programs and 
designing whole new approaches from scratch.  The training 
industry is around a $100bn field, with enormous resources 
devoted to trying to educate and re-educate employees the world 
over.  With a new understanding of the active ingredients in 
learning, of the "goodness" inside, perhaps we can all spend less 
time in pasteurized classrooms (which means less time away from 
our families), and learn much more while we are there.
  Dr.  David Rock coined the term "NeuroLeadership" and 
co-founded the NeuroLeadership Institute, a global initiative 
bringing neuroscientists and leadership experts together to build 
a new science for leadership development.  David is on the 
faculty and advisory board of Cimba, an international business 
school based in Europe.  He received his professional doctorate 
in the Neuroscience of Leadership from Middlesex University in 
2010.