At Cognitive Union, we’re laser-focused on ensuring participants of any learning know how to apply what they learn in the reality of their day job. It’s a fundamental part of our learning philosophy and driven by an evidence-based understanding of what helps people learn and retain information. Ultimately, the whole point of the learning is to be able to use the new knowledge, skill and mindset to perform better.
Have you ever taken part in a learning exercise at work, and promptly forgotten that brilliant piece of insight, at just the exact moment you need it? Or maybe the concepts were interesting, but it wasn’t clear how they would apply to your own role?
There are plenty of ways we can improve on these two types of experience, but in this piece, we’re focusing purely on how applying new learnings in context can help.
According to Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve, within one hour, participants will have forgotten an average of 50% of the information presented, rising to 70% after 24 hours, and 90% after a week.
However, when we get to doing the task we are being shown, i.e., apply it in our own setting, practise it, talk about it, reflect, or simply redescribe it in our own words, our retention of that information improves.
Effective learning and capability improvements come from the practical application of learning in context, and there are a number of approaches we use to encourage application in every piece of learning we deliver.
Five ways we bring application into our learning design and delivery
We aim for an absolute maximum of 50% of the learning time to be spent on theory, or keynote delivery. Meanwhile, a minimum of 50% should be spent on applying learning in context.
We also strongly encourage learners in our corporate training programmes to bring a live business problem they’re facing or a campaign they’d like to build to make the most of the learning application process.
Here are some of the methods we’ve successfully used in our training.
1. Introduce a method/framework activity
After discussing a relevant theoretical framework, learners should be able to apply it to their live business problem or campaign building. Participants are invited to join breakout conversations about what they’ve learned and map the framework to how they think about their customers, write out their ideas, and build in an experimental setting.
If learners don’t have a live problem or campaign to work on, we can introduce relevant examples of business problems for them to apply the frameworks in a similar manner.
2. Initiate a room debate
Aside from the breakout groups, the whole room (ideally with a mix of participants from multiple departments) should have the opportunity to debate a company’s current processes and how they can improve them based on what they’ve learned.
With this approach, our expert facilitator acts as a discussion moderator to keep the room on-topic and ensure everyone’s voice is heard. The benefit is that learners get to hear different perspectives on the same problems and may arrive at solutions they wouldn’t have considered otherwise.
3. Allow time for personal reflection
Allowing learners to actively reflect on what they’ve learned and how it applies to their company is one of the most valuable learning tools. It also provides the means for developing best practices and knowledge creation within the business.
At Cognitive Union, we offer silent time for reflection, and encourage learners to journal their thoughts, which aids organisational learning because they are able to think critically about what they’ve learned and how it applies to their business during this reflective process. This, in turn, means they are more likely to remember and apply the learning material after completing the training.
4. Adopt a teach to learn mindset
I was once told by a colleague that the best way to learn something new is to have to teach it. Recent evidence talks about the concepts of Elaboration and Generation for effective study. The idea here is to ask participants to explain the concept they’ve learned to someone else using their own words, or to elaborate on the topic. For example: “how would this concept apply in your own context?” or “if you were to follow this method, what would be the likely output?”
5. Facilitate an out-of-context activity
Finally, we often choose to use an out-of-context activity. Sometimes your own context is full of baggage that might distract you from the task at hand (like politics, systems, and other barriers that could make you feel less positive about introducing a new approach). So practising or exploring a new concept out of context can make it easier to remember and apply in a practical and engaging way.
One example of an out-of-context activity is Lego® Serious Play®. For instance, for organisations with a complex tech infrastructure, learners might find it easier to use Lego® to visually represent their existing set-up and describe their models to each other.
From there, they can reconstruct their model to show how they want it to perform, or to unearth tools the business doesn’t yet have, and discuss how they could get from model A to model B.
This approach encourages learners to think about business problems in a more abstract manner and helps them better articulate business problems and solutions. It also brings a sense of informality and experimentation since they’re not working with live systems to solve a problem.
Learning by doing improves employee capability
The purpose of investing in learning is to improve employee capabilities, and, ultimately, impact the business’s bottom line. The only way to achieve these goals is to empower employees to actively apply their learning in practice, and then, as we covered in our previous post, measure the impact of that learning.
If you’re looking for an L&D provider who puts learning into action and provides real-world context, contact our team today to learn more.