They say the most seductive words in the English language are, “I’d like your opinion about ….”

When you are an expert or a specialist tasked with teaching other people about what you know, the siren song of your own voice can be astonishingly seductive.

It’s nothing you intend, of course. You’re passionate about your topic. After all, you invested quite a bit of time and energy to learn what you have. And naturally you want to help people avoid many of the mistakes you made along the way.

So you explain as much as you can in the time you have, trying to squeeze as much helpful information into the session as the clock allows. But the more you try to help, the less they seem to learn. How maddening!

It turns out that when you are trying to train others, the most effective way to get your expertise out of your head is not via your mouth or even via your written words.

The most effective way to get your expertise out of your head is to create experiences for the people you are training.

For one thing, you probably don’t even recognize all the stuff you know. Many of the nuances have long since become so automatic that you’re no longer aware of them; you take them for granted as an obvious given.

Skeptical? Imagine yourself in the passenger seat trying to teach a complete novice how to drive. Could you really describe all the subtle things you do as a matter of course when you drive? When you press on the accelerator or the brake, how much pressure is too much or too little? How do you convey the “feel” of the best moment to hit the clutch and change gears?

That gap between what you know how to do and what you can actually explain is the difference between “procedural knowledge” and “declarative knowledge.”

So what is an expert or specialist to do? You can’t dump your experiences into someone else’s head.

But you can create targeted experiences for your learners. When you isolate a key concept to convey, you can pour the richness of your procedural knowledge into creating ways for your learners to practice it -- preferably ways that mimic the real world where they will be applying what you teach them.

In the case of your novice driver, you might find an empty parking lot or little-used country road where he or she can safely practice accelerating and braking without simultaneously worrying about turn signals and cross traffic and the hundreds of other details demanding a driver’s attention.

In a case of training new convenience-store managers, you can provide simplified scenarios that help them practice making key choices. Then gradually add more and more of the variables at play in the Real World. As an experienced convenience-store manager, you know these variables and their significance better than anyone. You know which details will create that certain “feel” you get when you are in a given situation and need to take action.

It’s not easy, of course, to stand back and let people practice -- making mistakes and correcting them with minimal intervention from you. You want to help! And they want you to help them. “I’d like your opinion about ….”

But in training, only a portion of what you know can get out of your head with words. Let your expertise out by creating targeted experiences, where much more of the richness of what you don’t realize you know can be absorbed by the people you train.

… 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.

You've known it for a while. The tidy rows of bullet points feel like sort of a cop out. You tried using that fancy template from Corporate to add some interest. You even added some terrific images you found on one of those stock photo sites.

But your slide deck still seems so ... blah. And you suspect it's not pulling its weight in helping your audience to learn about your topic.

Well scientists and academics have been working on that very issue. And they have found some very useful things.

We'll focus on just one of them here: cognitive load.

The concept, developed by John Sweller, refers to the amount of work required to understand something. In a sense, it refers to a kind of "traffic jam" in your brain's processing of information.

If you can keep information "traffic" flowing smoothly with your slides, you are well on your way to becoming a PowerPoint superstar.

Lightening the Load

One of the simplest things you can do to reduce cognitive traffic jams for your audience is to simplify your slides. Yup. Just stripping away whatever is not absolutely essential helps reduce the number of distracting elements competing for attention.

As a rule there aren't any prizes for having the fewest slides. Can you spread your concept from one or two busy slides to several sparse ones?

Competing Pathways

If you have lots of words on your slide, and worse, if what you are saying follows those words really closely, your audience is already skimming ahead to the last few bullet points when you haven't even finished with the first one. The effect in your brain is a bit like a movie with the sound track slightly off. Their eyes and their ears are literally providing competing input about what should be a unified scene. Traffic jam.

You can show some mercy for your audience by slashing the number of words on any given slide. A few key words to help them remember your major concepts will go a long way.

Letters Are Pictures

But not the kind that get processed efficiently. The input from your eyes is broken down into dozens of different components -- diagonal lines, horizontal and vertical lines, curves, textures, colors, etc. Your visual cortex has highly specialized areas that process very specific features of what you see before all the components get reassembled and interpreted.

Granted, all this happens really, really fast. But it does take measurably longer for your brain to process a series of abstract little pictures, say, T-I-G-E-R, than it does for it to process an image of a certain striped feline.

Another Round of Processing

Letters are symbols, of course, representing aspects of language. So the symbols need another layer of specialized interpretation.

Your auditory cortex and the areas around it are the major players in processing language, both spoken and written. So during a bullet-point-heavy presentation, this area is already busy interpreting the spoken words being picked up by your ears.

Meanwhile, back at the visual cortex, there's no interesting new input to process, and that part of the brain starts getting a little bored.

What's a presenter to do? Pictures and other visuals are your friend. Whenever you can covey a concept visually -- with an image or a graph, etc. -- you'll help keep both the visual and auditory corteces happy, and you'll give your ideas extra sticking power.

Relieving Traffic Congestion

How you design your slides can make a big difference in whether your audience's cognitive "traffic" flows smoothly or gets snarled in congestion.

One of the easiest, most high-impact ways you can keep things moving is to simplify your PowerPoint slides. Limit the number of concepts on each slide, and strip away any elements that you can get by without.

Can you trim a few more words? And a few more? Can you convey at least part of the the idea visually instead?

Your audience will appreciate how much easier it is to absorb what they are trying to learn from you.

Sometimes it’s painful even to watch. The facilitator poses a question to the group.

Silence.

You wince in sympathy, possibly remembering a time when it was you speaking to an unresponsive audience. It can be the stuff of nightmares.

So what went wrong? Odds are the facilitator did one or more of the following:

Asked for participation before warming up the audience
Asked trite questions that didn’t add value or help people absorb the material
Asked people to answer out loud with no thinking or rehearsal time.

So what can you do to avoid the fate of the poor soul who just created that awkward moment?

Here are a few tactics that will help you get participants energized and talking:

30-second rehearsal: Next time you toss out a question that meets with dead air, say, “Take 30 seconds at your table and brainstorm some possible answers.”

Raise the volume with partners: Have participants share their answers with a partner, which maximizing the number people talking at the same time. This immediately raises the energy in the room. (Conversely, if you need to quiet a boisterous classroom, reduce the number of simultaneous voices by grouping them in larger numbers – like sets of four, six or eight.)

Cue the music: Having energetic music playing before a training session starts can make a surprising difference. And playing it in the background when you ask participants to do something in pairs or groups serves the double purpose of 1) raising the energy, and 2) acting as a signal for when to begin the discussion and when to end it.

Cut Discussions a Little Bit Short: Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. She theorized that an incomplete task or unfinished business creates “psychic tension” within us and this tension acts as a motivator to drive us toward completing the task or finishing the business. It’s called the Zeigarnik Effect. For facilitators this means stopping small-group 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.

True for You: Have participants stand at their seats. As they hear each statement they should sit down and immediately stand back up again if the statement is true for them. (If it’s not true for them, they simply remain standing.) It’s important to start from and return to a standing position; that’s what makes it such a powerful energizer. Statements you use are limited only by your imagination. Here are some examples:

Just for fun: “You remember exactly where you were when you heard Elvis had died”
Learning about the group: “You have been in this industry for less than three years.”
Reinforcing content: “You will have a chance to apply the _____ technique within a week.”

So what are your favorite tactics for energizing a quiet group? Share them in the comments!

It doesn’t matter whether “training” appears in your job description or not. Love it or hate it, you have just been made responsible for introducing some new stuff to your fellow employees.

Naturally you want to do a good job. And you genuinely want to help your colleagues succeed.

Furthermore, you know that it takes very nearly the same amount of effort to create a dull, mediocre training as it does to create something powerful. So why not create something with real impact?

So you start at the end result -- when the participants are back on the job.

Imagine you are a fly on the wall watching two people going about their work. One of them took the training you created. The other did not.

From your perspective as a fly on the wall, how do you determine which is which?

Remember, a fly can’t read minds. The only way the fly can determine whether someone knows something is by observing their behavior.

What is the trained employee doing that the untrained one is not? What are the specific actions you see as this fly one the wall that lead you to conclude Jose took the training, and Jane did not?

Incidentally, while true-false questions and matching games are common in training, you may notice a conspicuous absence of these in the day-to-day work of Jose and Jane. “Proof” that they know something new shows up in their actions.

So what are the implications of these imagined observations for the training you are about to put together?

1) Start by thinking through what participants need to DO rather than what they need to know.
2) Create exercises or practice scenarios that imitate as closely as possible what participants should be doing back on the job.
3) NOW -- and only now -- you are ready to identify what participants will need to know in order to do the activities you designed.

Here's alist of questionsto help you dig down to the specifics of what participants need to DO back on the job.

When they take your training, your participants will be impressed at the value of what you provided. But if your workplace is accustomed to lecture and “death by PowerPoint,” the manager requesting the training might not be so impressed by the early drafts.

Next time: How to negotiate with the manager so that everybody wins.

What do you think we were hoping you would do as a result of reading this post? What would a fly on the wall observe watching you? Let us know in the comments!