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July 28, 2025
But it's the tenth time I've told him...
Hell, that one doesn't understand anything...
It comes in through one ear, it comes out through the other and there is nothing in between.
You must have already heard or said these words.
It undermines your morale because you have the impression that training your learner (let's call him Michel for the example) is mission impossible.
But is the problem with Michel?
Is your training method really effective?
At Sinfony, we have set up a well-established learning system that allows after a few weeks to have learners as competent as our consultants.
There is a natural phenomenon in our brain that has the tendency to destroy any learning effort.
I'm going to show you how our system fights against this phenomenon, but first I need to talk to you about the two types of memory that exist.
Our brains have two types of memory.
One to save the superfluous in the short term, for example, think about buying 2 baguettes and 4 pains au chocolat at the bakery.
The other will make it possible to save information over the long term that the brain will consider important, even vital: beware of a barking dog, for example.
If he thinks it's not important enough, he forgets it!
And he forgets it very quickly...
This notion of forgetting was theorized by the philosopher Hermann Ebbinghaus.
He put the concept of forgetting into an equation and a curve.
You will find a lot of videos on YouTube that will explain it to you in detail.
Now, let's see together the 3 things you need to put in place to fight against the forgetting curve at Michel and for your training to be more effective.
When information is associated with a sufficiently strong positive or negative emotion, it benefits from a free pass, a kind of skip-the-line to double all the other information that is not associated with emotions.
Thus, it is lodged directly in the long-term memory.
This is the reason why we use the personification of our learner by calling him Michel.
The fact of materializing our methods around Michel allows us to bring out a feeling of empathy, even pity for him as well as an ounce of guilt in the learner.
This emotional state makes it easier to assimilate knowledge.
In the same way, during our face-to-face training, we make the learners dance and laugh, to associate positive and joyful emotions with something that is not necessarily very joyful at the core:
documentation.
ATTENTION!!!
If the associated emotion is too strong, traumas can be created. This is the case of serious accidents, for example.
You can also find the content of this article on our YouTube channel, and subscribe 👍!
If the information is not associated with an emotion, then the brain must see the information several times to say “Oh, hey, I've seen this information several times, maybe it's important...”
So, the second time he sees the information, he will store a piece of it.
The third time, it will store yet another one, etc.
In short, you will have understood, the more my brain sees information, the more it will write it into long-term memory.
This is why classroom PowerPoint courses to explain procedures are not very useful.
It's like throwing a rock into a pond. It makes waves for a few minutes, and then... nothing.
If your trainers are already well aware of this, they can already design their training content with the following elements:
- a refresh at the end of the session,
- a digital refresh the next day,
- a refresh one week later,
- then a month later,
- then 3 months later...
But at this point a problem arises.
How do you manage all these digital refreshes?
You're going to tell me that it's unmanageable, that it's a mess.
That is true but only because you reason with your current practices.
In fact, you are going to have to learn two new practices.
A refresh on a given concept can be done with a 3-minute video,
to snack alone between two activities, or at the morning meeting, in a group.
Training is not necessarily a long, heavy and painful thing.
The second practice is technical.
You must use an LMS, like ours, to be able to trigger individual training actions automatically,
according to pre-determined conditions.
Not all LMS are the same on this point.
If you want to change your LMS contact us HERE.
We will give you the best recommendations.
At the end of the session when you are doing a quiz, a hot evaluation to check that Michel understood correctly.
At that point, we are still at the top of the forgetting curve.
However, since the beginning of this video, I have been telling you that the problem is after, in the days, weeks, and months following the training.
Normally, if you apply the first two tips well, your courses will be more impactful thanks to emotions and will be more persistent thanks to refreshes.
However, you still need to assess whether Michel retained what he learned several weeks after the initial training.
The right way is to do a formal cold assessment, which can allow you to recalibrate the depth, duration and importance of the refreshes you offer Michel.
You can do this evaluation in the form of an automated mini quiz
automatically launched by the LMS which will choose the right frequency.
You can also take advantage of service meetings or debriefing sessions.
on process reviews to share with everyone.
You may be saying to yourself that it's going to be a big mess to manage and that it's going to cost you.
Let's be clear.
No bread, no gain.
You can't complain about having Michels who don't remember anything if you don't implement the means to fight against the oblivion curve.
Having Michels who do not know what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they should do it, generates delays, errors, reworks...
In short, hidden costs that you don't see (or don't want to see).
This forgetting curve is unavoidable because it is biological.
We are all born with it.
With these 3 tips, you are armed to control its harmful effects on your training.
If you want to go further, I offer you free access to part of our training at “Doc & Training simplification”.
Right away on the other side.