Cameron Herold walks through a four-stage learning cycle: abstract conceptualization, active experimentation, concrete experience, and reflective observation. He says managers retain training better with pretests, repeated practice through role-plays, group discussion over lunch, delayed post-tests, and certification to confirm they've actually used the skill.
Chapters
So I was just thinking about all the companies that I've built over the years, and I was also thinking about school. And I don't really remember anything that I learned in school. I mean, think back to when you were in high school for a second. How much of the math do you remember? How much of the history lessons do you remember? All those hours that you studied chemistry and biology, you know, whatever. How much of it do you actually remember today? And that's really the core problem with us in growing our companies is our leadership team don't really remember the skills that they have or that they've learned along the way. So I'm going to give you some lessons on some really easy to digest lessons that will help you to grow your company by growing your people. So the first thing is that all adults control the learning process. So until a learner is ready to learn, they're not going to retain that information. So the information we do remember in high school or from school was the stuff that we cared about learning. We cared about actually paying attention to it and learning it. So it kind of stayed deeper in our memory bank. So in coaching your managers or trying to grow your company, you want them to want to learn. So it's called creating a gap. So what I do in my invest in your leaders course is every module has a pretest which the person will take to show them that they don't know the information. So any training you're doing in your company, you need to give them a short test to make sure that they see they have no idea what they're about to learn. So let's say as an example that I'm going to be teaching a course on interviewing. I'll give them a short pretest and every person who takes the interviewing pretest will fail the pretest, which creates a gap which has them then wanting to learn that information. So then learners go through a four stage cycle. The first stage is called abstract conceptualization. So the abstract conceptualization is when they learn the concept. So that's when they might be reading the information or watching the information for the first time. It's kind of like right now you're learning some information about learning. So that's the abstract conceptualization. The second stage of the process is the active experimentation. So it's when they take the conference, the information and they try using it, the role playing, the practicing. So in my invest in your leaders course, people will watch the information, they'll read the information, then they'll try it out in their day to day they might try it out with their peers, they might talk about it over a lunch. The third stage is the concrete experience and that's when they're actually learning from doing so. The stage that they're going to learn it, they're going to practice it and role play it, they're actually going to go out and work on it. And then the fourth stage is the reflective observation. That's when they go back and think about the learning that they've had. So one of the things I'm noticing with the invest in your leaders course is that people will actually learn the content. They might practice it in their day to day, they'll go back and watch the videos three months later, six months later. And it's set up with that intention as well for your managers and leaders to watch and learn the information a few different times over the course of the next year or even two years. So a bunch of the early people that have signed up for the industrial leaders course have their managers watching one or two modules and then doing a lunch on it on the following Monday to talk about what they learned. That's kind of a way to get the ideas to stick inside of their mind. So again, if I go back to my original thoughts, the reason that we don't remember the information that we learned in storage school is we learn the concept, but then we don't really practice and work on the concept. We don't talk about what we learned on that concept. We're not revisiting those concepts of what we're learning. What you want to do with, with the course, invest in your leaders or any of the information that your team is learning in the day to day is you want them to revisit that information, talk about the information they're learning, practice using it, and then what did they learn from doing it? Right? What were they doing well? What were they not doing well? If you really want to take it to the next level, you can also put in place something like a post test. So after they have learned the information, have they retained that information? The post test is one way, but then what about doing the post test again two weeks or six weeks later? Did they retain that information? Can they remember that information six weeks after doing it? Because we can all learn from a course that we're doing and then recite all the information really, really quickly right afterwards and pass the post test. Great. But what about six weeks later? Have we retained that information or have we lost it now? And then the last stage would be certifying your employees that they've actually been able to demonstrate using this skill in their day to day. So hopefully that gives you some insights as to why your managers and leaders aren't retaining the information they're learning right now and how you can actually take the content from the invest in your leaders course and put it deep into your day to day to help grow them. By the way, the more that you grow your people, the more they'll grow your company.
