Coaching
If you have ever considered yourself a good crammer, you will also have observed that immediately after the exam, your brain autodeletes the information such that the same exam taken by you even a week later, may result in a very different score. And yet we attach so much importance to one score or grade, often times basing an entire career path on it. This should be a very sobering thought. ent results?
MARKETING AFRICA
Coaching
Thrity Engineer-Mbuthia
The Forgetting Curve
Susan was excited. She was scheduled to attend a training on Emotional Intelligence. It was a three day training, and it looked interesting. Susan loved to learn. She was eager to soak up new information and insights that she could apply to her leadership journey. Emotional Intelligence sounded like a very useful area and she could see from the course outline, it started by focusing on self.
Self-awareness was the first step, before understanding how to work with teams and other stakeholders. She expressed her excitement to her peer manager, Nancy who seemed extremely skeptical. Nancy was of the opinion that emotional intelligence was something everyone was very good at. Nancy also believed she was very aware of herself so self-awareness wasn’ t a topic that interested her at all.
Before Susan and Nancy went for the training, they were asked to complete a personality assessment questionnaire. Susan created time and diligently went through the questions, reflecting deeply before choosing the answers. Nancy rushed through the responses, believing the whole exercise was a complete waste of time.
Both Susan and Nancy attended the training, but with completely different mindsets. During the training, Susan made notes, and paid attention to ideas and suggestions for her personal development.
She reflected on the report from the assessment tool, which highlighted her strengths and suggested areas for her to work on to better her emotional intelligence skills. Nancy, on the other hand, didn’ t write any notes, seemed distracted in class, spent a lot of time on her phone and didn’ t even read her assessment report.
Weeks after the training, the line manager who had previously attended the same training, made an observation. Nothing much seemed to have changed for Nancy. She was still having challenges with her team and from feedback reports, things seemed to be getting worse. When the line manager compared Susan’ s progress, there seemed to be a different outcome. Susan was making changes, she was listening more, she was doing her best not to interrupt in meetings, and her team reported that she was giving them opportunities to try different tasks without micromanaging them.
The line manager invited Susan for a meeting, and asked her to share her learnings. Susan had a lot to say and was happy to share all the different things she had learnt and the outcomes of her journey. When Nancy was invited for a similar session, she couldn’ t remember a single thing from the training and she had not put anything into practice. The line manager was confused. How could two team members who attended the exact same training, have such differ
If you have ever considered yourself a good crammer, you will also have observed that immediately after the exam, your brain autodeletes the information such that the same exam taken by you even a week later, may result in a very different score. And yet we attach so much importance to one score or grade, often times basing an entire career path on it. This should be a very sobering thought. ent results?
In 1885, the German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaum came up with a psychological model called The Forgetting Curve. The curve indicates the speed at which one forgets or how memory decreases with time. This tends to happen when the memory is not reinforced. Research suggests that almost 50 % of information can‘ evaporate’ within the first 24 hours. That figure keeps increasing and almost a month later, all that remains is approximately 2 %.
Susan’ s line manager might be very disturbed to hear this but the learning and development manager would be even more disturbed considering the budgets put aside every financial year for staff trainings. Imagine having to justify the return on investment only to have research suggest memory retention and recall is just 2 % after one month. And from a brand perspective, how does this affect marketing initiatives? Think about brand recall. When customers first see communication campaigns, what do they remember and does the brand name stick?
As a marketing professional, you are constantly having to scan the environment for emerging trends. Virtual reality tools, new customer relationship management methods, data analysis and visualization approaches and of course artificial intelligence tools. Life long learners love to learn. How many times have you opened an AI tool and you are sure you got the outcome you wanted, but now you can’ t remember how you did so. When was the last time you logged into your CRM tool and got a report showing revenue figures across different time periods, by customer- and now you can’ t recall how to generate the report?
The forgetting curve might explain why we forget, and demonstrate that memory reduces over time, but what we need is a way to strengthen or reinforce that memory, to reduce the loss. How can both Susan and Nancy be helped? How can the organization drive behavior change? How can
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