Companies often attempt to solve a business problem through classroom training or e-learning courses, but find it difficult to apply specific training goals and measure training results. I have these conversations every day.

New knowledge and skills start to fade as soon as your learners leave the training. In fact, 90 percent of learners quickly forget the new knowledge and skills learned in training and revert to old habits. It is as if the training never took place at all! This severely threatens the ultimate goal of increasing knowledge retention and driving lasting behavior change.

Can you imagine how that would work in an Olympic program?

While organizations invest a lot of time, money, and resources in their training programs, the training doesn’t stick and the impact is very low. So how do you move learners into actively applying their new skills and knowledge back on the job? In this chapter, you will learn how the brain works, why your learners forget, and what is needed for behavior change.

THE EFFECT OF MIND-SET ON LEARNING

Before we discuss why your learners forget what they’ve learned and how to create behavior change, it’s important to understand how the brain works. Our brains not only store all of the new information we learn, but they also retrieve information when we need it. How can you help your brain be more invested in learning and better trained in storage, stickiness, and retrieval?

If you understand why people attend training programs in the first place, the design of your reinforcement program will be much easier. You may think that people think about the benefits of learning and choose the best option for their future. That is usually not the case.

The Prospect Theory describes the way human beings make decisions. Instead of choosing the most beneficial situation that may exist, people place more value on what they could lose than on any benefits they may get from an unknown future. So when deciding to invest time to learn, grow, and change their behavior, the learners rate the potential losses higher than the potential benefits.

Consider this scenario. Would you choose option A or option B:

1. Receive $900.
2. Take a 90 percent chance of winning $1,000 (and a 10 percent chance of winning $0).

Did you avoid the risk and choose option A, the $900? Most people do, although the expected outcome is the same in both cases.

However, if I asked you to choose between the next options, which one would you choose?

1. Lose $900.
2. Take a 90 percent chance of losing $1,000.

You would probably prefer option B and thus engage in risk-seeking behavior in the hope of avoiding the loss.

Your learners also tend to overweigh options that are certain and to be risk-averse for gains. We would rather have an assured, lesser win than take the chance at winning more (but also risk possibly getting nothing). The opposite is true when dealing with certain losses: learners engage in risk-seeking behavior to avoid a certain loss.

When your learners need to change their behavior, they are not always assured of a win. The result of using what they’ve learned is an unknown for the learner: “Will I succeed?” If they change their behavior successfully, they probably “win” more, that is, they reach a higher performance level, have more impact, or receive a promotion. What if they don’t succeed? In the learner’s mind, practicing the new behavior you are trying to reinforce can be seen as a risk. On the other hand, if the company insists on behavioral change because it’s needed to improve the company’s performance, your learner will probably take the risk instead of losing his job.

If your learner participates in your follow-up reinforcement program, they always have to deal with unknowns and risk-seeking behavior. They are thus critical, and you continually need to add value—in your content, in your timing, in your communication, in your style of writing, in your use of media, in your approach to driving participation, in your complete program. Encourage learners to think of what they will learn and can achieve with your program.

If you add the learner’s mind-set to the training decision, it becomes even more interesting. How does the learner think about their current skills and behavior? If they have a fixed mind-set, they have fixed ideas about their current skills; they don’t have any interest in trying new things because the learning may expose that they are not smart enough or they don’t know how to do something that the new skill is based on. If you look in your organization, you probably will recognize this mind-set. You may also recognize the people with a completely opposite mind-set, a growth mind-set. This type of learner likes to take on more challenges and try new things, even if they may fail or their primary focus is on something other than growth and improvement.

If you want to change behavior in an environment that contains learners with both mind-sets, focus your program on the growth mind-set and on the future benefits that will help your learners overcome the Prospect Theory. Unfortunately, those who choose to “win” and possess a growth mind-set are not obvious, which makes behavior change a challenge. The use of The 7 Principles of Reinforcement will help you a lot.

In top-level sports, the Prospect Theory and the right mind-set are important. My coach taught me that Judo, as a martial art, is a mind game. He always said, “It’s not the other Judo player who can beat you, it’s your brain that makes you lose.” He started with some mind coaching when I was young. He started with “Believe in yourself,” “Have trust in the time and effort you spent in the preparation.” Later, in preparation for the Olympics, we spent a lot of time understanding how one’s mind-set influences performance.

During a Judo tournament, opponents fight five or six times per day, and if you win a match, you move to the next round. If you lose, the competition for that day is over. No rematch, no medal, and no success. This is what top athletes hate the most.

In the beginning of my career, I lost countless fights in the last minute, not because of my condition but because of the way I thought. In the 1990s a Judo fight lasted five minutes. In most of my fights, I scored more points in the first four minutes than my opponent did. So, with one minute to go, I was the winner. During that last minute, my brain would start to work at maximum speed. “What if I lose?” “What if I can’t stop his attacks?” “I can’t keep this going for another minute.” “What if. . . .”

All the thoughts were negative. They were focused on losing what I had—the good score and a winning position. My biggest opponent was myself. With thoughts of losing the winning position, my brain decided not to attack anymore, but to switch to defense. It was the Prospect Theory in action. Instead of continuing to attack, I would think of how I could “survive” my opponent’s attacks. Because he was in exactly the opposite situation, he needed to attack to win the game. In his situation, he had nothing to lose, so his brain chose to attack and go for the win. It was classic Prospect Theory: engaging in risk-seeking behavior in the hope of avoiding a loss.

The winning Judo player is defensive near the end of the match, and the losing player is active. Because Judo is a refereed sport, the player who tries to defend himself receives penalties. When penalties are levied, points are awarded to the opponent. Even when an opponent fails to score a point with an attack, he gains points because of the penalties. Switching to a more defensive approach (the Prospect Theory) after I had been successful for four minutes by using an attack approach was not good. I learned over time not to switch; I had to believe in the win instead of avoiding the loss.

An old piece of Judo wisdom I heard when I lived in Japan expresses this mind game exactly: “Attack is the best defense.” So even when your brain wants to avoid losing, don’t change to a defensive approach; stay in the attack mode.

Over the years, I learned how to challenge my brain in a way that would support my decisions to attack and to grow. This mind game is happening all the time for everyone. You need to understand what is happening and avoid assuming that all learners automatically believe in the benefits of your program. As I mentioned before, always add value for the learner and encourage learners to think of what they will learn and can achieve with your program.

If you want to build a strong reinforcement program and make maximum use of the way our brains work, remember that the human brain likes contrast. Instead of learning XXXX YYYY, learn XYXYXYXY. In Chapter 11, you will learn all about the balance between direction and friction. The learners may feel confused, but they are learning better.

MEMORIES AND EMOTIONS PLAY A ROLE

For the retrieving part of learning retention, memories and emotions are important. In your brain, the hippocampus stores and produces memories, and your amygdala stores and produces emotions.

That combination of memories and emotions is a solid foundation for successful behavior change. Before you design your program, evaluate your current training. How intense are the learning memories and emotions that the learners create? Is your training more like a lecture, or is it experiential learning?

An Olympic athlete’s training is all about memories and emotions. My body still reacts to a specific word that my coach used over and over again. No matter whether it was spoken during an intense training on the beach, a very technical training in the gym, an evaluation session, or a lecture, that word has been stored in my brain and connected with all kind of situations, smells, feelings, frustrations, and successes. It wasn’t difficult to retrieve then and isn’t difficult to retrieve today. That word still excites me, even though I finished my Judo career in 1993. Initiative!

If you use media or expressions in your reinforcement program, use the same images, sayings, words, or expressions you used in the training event. The hippocampus and amygdala work together to help your learners retrieve feelings and emotions about the topic. This combination makes the retrieval more intense and valuable for behavioral change.

YOU WILL FORGET

To encourage retrieval, the brain must be challenged at the appropriate time and at the point of forgetting. The 7 Principles I describe in this book will help you to determine the appropriate timing and challenges the brain needs to change behavior. Before you invest time and effort to master The 7 Principles of Reinforcement, let’s take a closer look at the point of forgetting.

When are these forgetting points? Back in 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, began an experimental study on the relative strength of memory over a short period of time. In his experiment, Ebbinghaus repeatedly tested subjects’ retention of various nonsense syllables over a variety of time periods. From his studies, Ebbinghaus plotted what is now called the Forgetting Curve (see Figure 2.1).

The Effect of Repetition

Ebbinghaus hypothesized about the effects of over-learning material. He thought that over-learned material was harder to forget, making the participants’ Forgetting Curve shallower. Ebbinghaus asserted these three things about learning and increasing the strength of retention:

1. Information should be repeated over a period of time.
2. Using mnemonic techniques can help memory.
3. The material that is presented should be meaningful.

With each repetition of the material, your learners retain more information. The Forgetting Curve shows that learners forget the most material in the first 24 hours, so you should start as soon as your training event ends.

Figure 2.2 illustrates that a repetition moment interrupts the descending line of the Forgetting Curve. If you also look at the timing of the repetitions, you will notice that the Forgetting Curve is less steep after each repetition. This means that, over a period of time, you don’t need as many repetitions as in the beginning.

If you think you only need five repetitions for your learners to remember the material and change their behavior, I must disappoint you. A reinforcement program is much more than increasing the strength of a memory. It’s crucial to retrieve the learning, so let’s focus next on the use of mnemonic techniques, which Ebbinghaus also mentioned.