The Thinking Behind the Ideas
Sometimes instinct and evidence part company: what ‘feels good’ can often be deceptively distinct from what actually works. These short articles offer a peek under the hood of some of the evidence behind our work: how we train, build and measure.
In training
Why we spread sessions across weeks and build them on recall, not rereading, even though cramming feels more productive.
In the systems we build
Why fluent writing can feel right without being right, so every draft prompts its reviewer on what to check. And why new tools stall without anyone choosing to hold back, so every build comes with training and a champion.
In research and evaluation
Why how a session felt says little about what it changed, so we measure capability, with a comparison wherever one is possible.
Mind the gap
Why learning spread out beats learning crammed in
The same amount of study produces far more durable learning spread across separate sessions than crammed into one, even though cramming feels more productive at the time.
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Strain it to retain it
Why the effort of remembering is what makes knowledge last
The act of retrieving something from memory changes that memory, so pulling information out builds more durable learning than putting the same information in again.
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The illusion of learning
Why ease is the least reliable signal that learning is happening
We judge whether we are learning by how the learning feels, and that feeling is often manufactured by things that have almost nothing to do with whether anything is being learned.
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Nothing ventured, nothing changed
Why adoption often stalls without anyone choosing to hold back
Almost every real decision includes the option of carrying on as we are, and that option gets chosen more often than its merits alone would explain.
Read itStart with a conversation.
Bring a question about how your people learn, decide or take on something new, and we’ll talk through what the evidence says.