… wait. Not a long time, of course. Just enough to create a little bit of tension.

People in all sorts of situations tend to remember incomplete tasks or issues much more readily than completed ones. The lack of closure that stems from an unfinished task promotes some continued task-related cognitive effort.

It’s called the Zeigarnik Effect, after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik. She noticed that wait staff seemed to remember individual orders surprisingly well … until after the order was served.

In her 1962 work "The Pathology of Thinking," Zeigarnik theorized that an incomplete task or unfinished business creates “psychic tension” within us. This tension acts as a motivator to drive us toward completing the task or finishing the business.

Good speakers will often use this effectively with an opening story or metaphor, stopping just short of finishing the idea. With the story left at maximum tension, the audience remains alert to clues to how it ends, which helps them absorb the rest of what they speaker is saying before resolving the tension.

In the context of helping people learn, you can use the Zeigarnik effect in a couple of ways.

When you are facilitating, stop small-group and partner discussions when you notice the volume in the room is just starting to drop after reaching its loudest. Then “finish” the idea as a large group.

When you are writing training, build in this delay. For example, open a new chunk of content with an unfinished story. Frame your subsequent content in terms of how the story might be resolved or the problem solved.

When you “close the loop” on that section of content, participants’ brains reward resolving the tension with a nice little dose of natural opiates. Now you have helped them to absorb the ideas you are trying to teach and to feel good about doing so. It’s a win-win all around.