In recent interactions with a number of different clients, an age old issue has reared its head.  The subject matter experts and function heads need to ensure people know and understand something – a new process, a decision making framework, who does what and to whom.  There’s lots of information and, because getting on people’s radar is so tricky in our packed working days, there’s not a lot of opportunity to give people the details we think they need.

As our time with potential learners reduces, it seems the amount of information we need them to learn increases by roughly an equivalent amount.

There’s another problem.  When we do get access to some of our people, they don’t seem able to concentrate for that long.  In fact, in a networked world with everyone connected to everyone and everything 24/7, we seem to be fighting for their undivided attention even when they’re sitting there in front of us.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon.  A friend’s father was lecturing in US colleges in the 70’s and 80’s and it was clear to him that students in lectures had a natural shut off point after about 13 minutes.  Without the introduction of something new and different the level of engagement and retention of key messages was reduced.  There’s a clear explanation.  US TV was always fairly heavily interrupted by adverts and in the 70s and 80s, this was the distraction of choice for the average American.  You can insert here your own story of going to the cinema, or the theatre, presenting to a group or observing interactions in public spaces.  I’ve certainly run workshops with quite senior people who can’t be divorced from their blackberry for a moment and for whom the vibrating mobile device drags them away from even the most engaging of tasks.  Even if we have an amnesty on mobile devices, tablet PCs and the like, the ever present shape of the black box in their pocket tugs at their attention.  Having switched the device off, you can see the twitches as the session progresses. Breaking for an exercise or group activity provides an opportunity to get a quick fix.  Status, self esteem and importance is defined by how much they are needed elsewhere.  As they try to focus, their attention is demanded by someone else.  If it isn’t, they fret about their diminishing influence.

From 13 minutes of input between ad breaks, we have moved to the 3 minute music video, the 140 character Tweet, the one line insights on Facebook and the false but compelling urgency of the computer game.  13 minutes of attention seems strangely like a halcyon time in a task switching world. Without a rapidly moving and changing series of inputs, we lose people.  If you want to check out how your attention span has developed (or otherwise) Try this quiz

This tension between the increasing amount of information needed to do even quite routine tasks and the bombardment and demands on our senses from real people and virtual contacts is acute and growing.

What to do about it?

The clients who want to pack the agenda and increase the number of slides required, each packed with more and more detail, will often demand a pre-read of some description.  So we send 20 or so pages of tightly packed text to someone who lacks any context to appreciate its importance.  Even assuming our learners do make the time to read the information in advance, do we know what level of attention they gave it while they were looking at the pages.  Yes they may have skimmed the words, but did they understand it?  To what extent is the information internalised or processed?  In most cases, we simply don’t know and, fearing that they will have missed the key points, we reiterate the messages they should have picked up at the start of the session.

Occasionally we can request our learners to undertake some pre-work via an online module.  The ability of our systems to check understanding and track completion provides a little more assuredness that this work has been done. We can plan on the basis that everyone will arrive at the session with a similar level of understanding.  But we also know that if we give them too much, it won’t get done.  Often the amount of pre-workshop information required is simply too much to be adequately incorporated into the 30 minute e-learning module, which seems to be the outer limit of what people will happily undertake.

What other options exist?

The first option is to work out what people actually need to know and can quite reasonably be expected to learn.  Giving people a whole book’s worth of material is unlikely to be effective.  You could give your learners War and Peace but it’s futile if all they can remember at the end is that “It’s about Russia”.

Having conducted a radical edit – and I warn you that will be painful if you’re trying to do that with a committee of content experts – we then need to tackle the issue of context.

When is the best time to give people information?  We assume that the more they have in advance, the better.  Is that always true?  I think a lot of the information we need about new processes, products, organisational structures etc, is actually often more effective if provided after the workshop.  Re-focus the workshop on why and general principles, and provide supporting detail when people get to the thorny issues of actually making it happen.  Often what people need in the day to day execution of new ways of working is not training but what we might call EduComs.

The challenge with creating EduComs is making something which is rooted in the activity rather than in the theory.  If we create short information pieces with key messages which are obvious and easily memorable we have a much greater chance of success.  I asked a client team to describe the 5 messages they needed to give people and to ensure that each one could be written on a t-shirt.  After a 20 minute discussion, I realised that I’d asked for too much – the constraints of memory didn’t equate to the constraints of detail which they believed was required.

Is there no way that we can get people to engage with the detail?  Yes there is, but it needs to be carefully indexed and contained alongside the key, t-shirt message.

Think of this example.  You need to explain a new planning cycle.  The first message may be:

You can’t plan a journey until you know where you’re starting from.

It fits on a t-shirt. It’s memorable and – we hope – common sense.

The next level of information answers the question:  how do we define the starting point?

At this level we may focus on:

1.       Previous performance

2.       Competitor activity and results

3.       Trends

In each case we need to gather information – quantifiable data and numbers. We also need to generate insights.  An insight goes beyond data and includes why something happened and what we can learn from this analysis.

If I’m in a role in which I will be using these insights, that’s as much information as I need.

If I’m in a role in which I’m generating those insights I need more.  This is where the potential for expanding beyond passive one way communication comes in.  In our concept of EduComs we would advocate enabling people to link out to a short module on the do’s and don’ts of gathering data – where to find it and how to interpret it.  Perhaps there’s a worked example or case study in which the learner (for this is what they have now become) is presented with some real information and asked to analyse it and identify the insights.  The mini-e-learning module we have now created can give them feedback and pointers for what they got right, what they missed and how they could do it better.  Importantly I can track how they did and use this information to gather my own insights about the need for further support when they come to do this for real.

Let’s look at one of our categories in planning cycle. Maybe I’m looking at team performance over the past year.  The mini-module starts with some real information from last year and the year before and asks the learner to identify where they would look further to understand any differences in performance.  On the next screen I provide feedback and access to the information which, hopefully, they have requested in their answer to their first activity.

This time the question is around what they think is going on.  They are given a series of choices as to the insight they might generate.  Each option is plausible.  In fact, each one is right but just to differing degrees.  One option is clearly the optimum answer, but I have engaged their limited attention not by dumbing down, but by smartening up. Challenging content is often more favourably received by learners than something which is too simple to properly engage them.

In order to maximise the time I have with learners with limited attention spans I don’t just give them feedback in the way I did previously.  I ask them to play a video of the individual who really had to deal with that information and really had to generate those insights.  The experience from the front line of someone just like our learners is more in tune with the connected, social word in which we are fighting for attention.

A quick action plan – which they can save, print, and be reminded of later – and they’re out of there, on to the next thing or to answer that message on their blackberry.  In total, the learning component has required the development of 3 screens of content and about 10 minutes of learner time.  Short, sharp and focused.

The access to the learning could be embedded in the electronic copy of the workshop follow up materials – distributed via email or branded memory stick.  During the workshop they’ve covered principles and explored how those principles can and should be applied. Distributed via email or branded memory stick, they’ve also taken away materials they can use and re-use as support for cascading the key messages to their colleagues and teams.  This might be a simple word or pdf document with links embedded to the required e-learning alongside qualifying questions.  “Need to know what data to review and how to generate insights?  Click here.”

This is not a mechanism for addressing all learning issues.  However, if the primary focus of your learning activity is to inform and educate – rather than to build skills or change behaviour – then this may be a route to success.  A route to success which isn’t reliant on time your learners haven’t got and attention spans they’ll never have.