Forty-seven slides. A packed agenda running from nine to five with no white space in it. A facilitator who arrives determined to cover everything the business has ever wanted its people to know, all in one day.
Does that ring any bells?
I have sat in that room. I have, in my less experienced years, built that agenda. It always feels responsible. The stakeholders want breadth. The sponsor wants value for the training budget. Everyone agrees that since we have people in a room for a day, we should use every minute of it.
Here is the thesis, stated plainly: covering everything teaches nothing. More content does not mean more learning. Past a certain point, it means less. The firehose feels productive because it looks busy and sounds thorough. It is neither. It is expensive theatre, and the bill lands months later when nobody can remember, let alone apply, what they sat through.
The maths of forgetting
Ebbinghaus mapped this over a century ago, and every facilitator has watched it happen live. Without reinforcement, people forget the majority of new information within days. Cram forty-seven slides into someone’s head in a single sitting and you are not building knowledge. You are creating a brief impression of knowledge, one that decays before it reaches their inbox on Monday.
The people who study this properly, Brown, Roediger and McDaniel among them in Make It Stick, found something that should unsettle anyone still designing content-heavy days: the techniques that feel most effective while you are learning are often the least effective at making things stick. Re-reading a slide feels like progress. Hearing a concept explained fluently feels like progress. Neither leaves much behind. What works is retrieval. Making someone pull the answer out of their own head, under a bit of pressure, with no notes to lean on. That is uncomfortable in the room and durable afterwards. A firehose session has no time for it. There are more slides to get through.
Why cramming works against you
Three findings from that same body of research explain why a single content-dense day underperforms a well-spaced programme, even when the spaced version covers less.
Spacing beats massing. Learning returned to after a gap sticks harder than learning delivered in one unbroken block. A concept revisited a week later, even briefly, does more for retention than an extra hour spent on it today. The firehose does the opposite of this by design. It squeezes a month of ideas into a morning and calls it efficient.
Interleaving beats blocking. Mixing related but distinct skills or problems, rather than drilling one to exhaustion before moving to the next, produces better transfer to real situations. It feels harder at the time, which is precisely why most agendas avoid it. Easy sequencing sells better to a sponsor reading the outline than deliberately mixed practice does.
Desirable difficulty beats smooth delivery. If a session never makes people struggle a little, it probably is not teaching them much. Struggle, within reason, is where learning happens. A slick, friction-free day that glides from topic to topic gives people no opportunity to do the hard cognitive work that actually changes what they can do afterwards.
Put those three together and you get an uncomfortable conclusion for anyone who has built an agenda by asking “what do we need to cover” rather than “what do we need people to be able to do.” Coverage and capability are not the same thing, and optimising for one usually damages the other.
What actually sticks: the loop, not the list
At Cognitive Union we build sessions on a simple loop: framework, then worked example, then practise. Give people a clear model. Show it operating on a real, specific case, not an abstract one. Then hand them a problem of their own and step back while they wrestle with it.
That loop takes time per topic. It cannot be rushed through forty-seven slides. Which is exactly the point. A single topic run properly through that loop, with retrieval built in and a bit of spacing either side, will outperform ten topics skimmed. This is also where the presenting-training-facilitation spectrum matters. Presenting pushes information at people. Training pushes it too, with demonstrations bolted on. Facilitation pulls capability out of the room, through questions, practice and struggle. You cannot facilitate forty-seven slides. There simply is not room to pull anything out when you are still pushing everything in.
Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow is relevant here too. People do their best learning, and often their most engaged work, in that narrow band between boredom and anxiety, where the challenge matches their skill closely enough to stretch them without overwhelming them. A firehose day guarantees you miss that band for almost everyone in the room. The novices drown in volume they cannot process. The experienced people coast through content they already know, waiting for something that stretches them. Nobody finds flow in a fire hose.
Design for less, not more
The uncomfortable conversation happens before the session, not during it. It happens with the sponsor who wants six modules of value crammed into one day because that is what the budget bought. It happens with the stakeholder who is convinced that if a topic is not mentioned, it has been neglected.
The discipline is this: pick the smallest set of ideas that, learned properly, will change what people do differently on Monday. Cut everything else, or move it into a separate, spaced session. Activity without impact is expensive. A day that looks thorough but changes nothing is a bigger waste of money than a shorter day that actually lands. The sponsor rarely wants to hear that less is more. It is our job to make the case anyway, with the evidence behind it, because the alternative is spending their budget on a day people will not remember by Friday.
None of this is about the facilitator holding back for its own sake. It is about respecting how people actually learn, rather than how a busy agenda makes an organisation feel about the money it has spent. The firehose is not generosity. It is abdication dressed up as thoroughness.
Teach less. Teach it properly. People will remember it.
Cognitive Union works with large B2C and B2B businesses to build the commercial skills, digital fluency and customer-first thinking their teams need to perform — closing the capability gaps that sit between where teams are today and where the business needs them to be.
Lead. Don’t follow.
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