Increase retention by 150%

The typical retention rate of your average lecture is just 5%. But if you were shown 2,560 pictures over several days and then asked to choose which pictures you recognized, how many would you correctly recognize? The answer may change the way you communicate everything.

Seven ideas that can improve your communication skills by 150% or more.

1. Less IS more: Filing every moment of a meeting is not just a waste to some but a detriment to all. Simply giving people time to talk about what they have learned triples the return. They learn first when they hear the material, second as they think about it and third as they share it with others.

2. Chun-King: Don’t think about training in hours but minutes. The brain is designed to focus in ten minute segments. You don’t win the game of retention by throwing the most fastballs, but by continually changing up your delivery and reorganizing ideas to create new and unique connections.

3. Different is better: We habituate very quickly to familiar information and style. According to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman we experience 20,000 moments in each day. To keep from being overloaded our brains take shortcuts. Instead of seeing reality we look for patterns. Once a pattern is recognized we can devote our attention to unique and less predictable stimuli.

4. Connect the dots: Connecting new information with familiar ideas helps create a lattice of pathways enhancing retention while at the same time reducing the time and energy required. Memorizing 200 nonsensical syllables may require ninety minutes or more, while the same amount of information in rhyme can be stored in as little as ten.

5. Tell a story: Stories relax, engage and entertain. They allow listeners to drop their defenses and involve them in anticipating the unfolding lessons contained within.

6. Use humor: Humor not only bonds an audience in a shared experience, but the “surprise” factor provides an unexpected jolt to our attention. This “disorienting dilemma” stirs our emotions, driving attention. Humor connects divergent ideas creating new associations with the potential of reframing “negative” experiences into a new context.

7. Use pictures: In the example we started with what percentage of pictures would you remember? When shown 280 pairs of pictures in one-second increments participants accurately remembered 85-95% of the pictures they had seen. A picture is worth a thousand words. Our brains work very hard to process written words. Pieces of each letter are stored in different parts of the brain. Vertical lines in one place, diagonals in another, and circular images in still another, all requiring reassembly to convey the meaning of a single word. Pictures on the other hand engage the viewer in a process of personal discovery. Images inspire our imaginations as we tell our story of their meanings. The benefits are compounded in our first inner dialogues and even more so when we share them with others. Familiar images convey a common understanding in the blink of an eye. Smokey Bear reminds us “only you can prevent forest fires” and McGruff the Crime Dog helps us all “take a bite out of crime”.

We selected the “Change the Buzz” Bees as a reminder that the key to sustainable transformation is not in doing, but in bee-ing. Mahatma Gandhi did not tell us to “do change”, but to “be the

change” we want to see in the world. Doing implies efforts to create change outside ourselves, while according to Gandhi the ”secret to our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – but in being able to remake ourselves.”