As learning professionals, we face a challenge: people forget what they learned from us, and they don’t feel the need to review what they used to know. We are constantly fighting a war against the forgetting curve.
There are several strategies that can defeat the forgetting curve. One is to make the material so sticky that learners can’t forget it. This is the approach of books like Made to Stick. The weapons of this strategy include stories, unexpectedness, and simplicity.
Another strategy is to revisit material. Research shows that re-exposure to ideas over time helps cement those ideas in our heads. But this strategy can be challenging because our learners may not choose to follow up with us weeks or months after a development experience.
Getting learners to re-engage is clearly a challenge of motivation. So, one of the tools we have as learning professionals to address motivation is gamification.
I just experienced a gamified version of reviewing what I had learned which was surprisingly compelling. I had subscribed to a two week email course on a topic. Each day, I read (okay, skimmed) through the emails and congratulated myself on my self-improvement efforts.
Each email also included a line about a secret code that I could find in a different email from that sequence. Most of them were relatively straightforward prompts, like asking for the name of the company mentioned in an example. I didn’t see any purpose to those questions, so I ignored them.
The very last email of the sequence changed my experience. I was told that, if I collected all the secret codes and submitted them, I would win a small prize from the organization that wrote the sequence. I was intrigued enough to go through the emails and jot down the codes.
About halfway through the process, I realized that I was being deliberately re-exposed to the material. In order to find the name of the company, I had to re-read the example, and that reminded me about the point that the example was making. I spent about half an hour reviewing the content. I never would have done that on my own initiative because I didn’t have a reason to. But with this small collect-them-all game, I did so.
There were a lot of details that made this mini-game work: the ask was small, my curiosity was piqued by the reward, and the collect-them-all nature of the game played to the completionist impulses in my nature. But, there was nothing about the content that made this experience unique: I could implement a similar mechanism in any learning event and trigger that response.
Think about ways that we as learning professionals could implement a similar structure in our experiences:
- Participants could get follow-up emails from a class, and they could have to collect the secret codes from those follow-up emails.
- Secret codes could be embedded in the slides or handouts from a training experience, and the participants could be told about the mini-game after a few weeks in order to trigger their own review of the material.
- For a technical training, the secret codes could be parts of the user interface. The message prompting participants to play the game becomes a way to encourage their exploration and use of the technical tool.
- When writing summaries of career development conversations, a leader could include a secret code in the write-up. Then, at the end of the year, the leader could give the game to the direct report in question, encouraging that person to review the feedback they have received over the year.