The psychology of leading people to learn & change?

How can you save 30% of time & money on training?

If you are in a leadership position & responsible for driving a change or training your people on specific skills, this insight is for you. You can save 30% of time & money on training your people without compromising on the desired results.

It was in early 1970, almost 100 years after the typewriter & QWERTY keyboard were invented. British Post Office had an enormous task to train their 10,000 postal workers to learn how to type & use a keyboard. Since the Post Office has already invested heavily in machines for speed & accuracy, now the training must be designed optimally without leaving anything to chance.

To make it a success they hired the famous psychologist Alan Baddeley to discover & determine the best methods of training their employees. The reason behind choosing Alan was his phenomenal research on working memory known as Baddeley’s model.

Alan formed two groups for this study on the best training methods. One group attended the training for four hours a day and the other for one hour a day. Initially the people in the one hour a day group started feeling demotivated as if they were not learning faster compared to the four hour a day group.

Finally, both groups demonstrated almost the same level of speed & accuracy in typing & using a QWERTY keyboard. The difference in the duration of the training was interesting & insightful. The four hours a day group completed the training in 5o hours whereas the one hour a day group completed the training in 35 hours.

A few months later Alan the psychologist again tested both the groups and found the results remained the same. The one hour a day group did better in mastering the skill, which was a difference of 30 per cent on time & money.

Another most interesting finding was that even the slowest person in the one hour a day group mastered the skill in less time than the quickest person in the four hours a day group.

How did this happen? Usually while training our people, we focus on learning as an integral part. But the brain scans reveal that there are two essential elements of training, and we miss the second one which is “Forgetting”.

In the spaced program we divide the training into smaller chunks with considerable gaps in between. These gaps make us forget the learning of the previous session and work harder to remember & revise it before the next session. The process of forgetting and remembering makes us relearn and reinforce. It also helps us recall the learning in the long term hence the lasting results.

Hence, if you want to save 30 per cent of time & money on training, then use the ‘Spaced’ approach instead of an intensive one go training program.

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