ConvaTec

Rachel Horwitz

Many of you have only read my work online and do not know that I am a very small statured woman. My two boys, one aged 12, is taller than me and my other son, who is nine, is almost as tall as me. So that gives you an idea of where I stand (no pun intended) in the height situation.

The good news is that both my passion, learning, and my height, short, have now come together in the world of learning and development.

By now you’ve probably seen and heard about bite-sized learning, microlearning, nudges, questions, texts, you name it. It’s all about brevity and gaining someone’s attention in under 5 minutes.

In my company, we are testing the limits of gamification, microlearning, nudges, and short bursts of learning using 3 to 5 questions a day and playing games. Actual learning takes five minutes a day! We talk about learning in the flow of work, or learning in the flow of life, getting coffee in the morning, walking the dog, getting your car fixed, you can now focus your attention on learning during this time as well.

My day typically looks like this. I get up, get ready for work, have my coffee, take out my phone, play a quick game of color crush, answer 3 to 5 questions, and begin to answer my emails and plan my day. And guess what? I have learned a lot in the past 4 months. Originally, I was not necessarily a believer. I was pretty confident that I needed to really take dedicated time out of my day to focus on learning. I even blocked off hours a week to focus on learning. But after about one month of 3 to 5 minutes a day of learning,  and playing a few games I guarantee to you that I have learned a lot.

We all know that learning only really works for those who want to learn and improve themselves. If your employees are not really interested in learning, then having them click through an hour of e-learning videos or sit in a class all day isn’t going to actually make them learn or even change their behavior.

“I engage my brain to answer questions about content which I’ve already been exposed to and this helps me remember what I may have been taught in a classroom, e-learning, or microlearning.”

The concept of 3 to 5 minutes a day answering 3 to 5 questions is about learning reinforcement. I engage my brain to answer questions about content which I’ve already been exposed to and this helps me remember what I may have been taught in a classroom, e-learning, or microlearning.

Without getting too technical, brain science has proved that when you engage your brain to relax, as in playing a game, then you ask your brain which engages it to think and new neural connections are made. The brain is processing information which it already been provided with, and the reinforcement further imprints in our brainwaves consistently.

Here is an actual example of how we have done this at work. We created a microlearning about prioritization and time management, which is something we all most likely need to improve upon. The daily 3 to 5 questions focused on the prioritization matrix and we reinforced learnings with additional questions about tasks that are urgent and important. About two weeks after introducing the learning, in my weekly meeting with my team, I found my colleagues discussing their priorities in terms of level of urgency and level of importance. We started to think through our work in terms of what we could delegate, delete, and complete by ourselves or others.  Then we celebrated. It worked! This is an example of not only learning the content, but even changing our behavior as a result. This proved to me that daily learning reinforcement in short, bite-sized bursts works.

Now I’m taking my step stool and my short learning everywhere I go and as I work with my stakeholders and SMEs, we are designing and developing learning in this manner.

I challenge you to try it, and, in short, it works.