How To Make Your Knowledge Sticky!

Today what we are going to reflect upon is Imparting knowledge. Specifically, how do you impart knowledge and make “it sticky” so that others don’t forget it. How do you give the information in a way that they can recall it and make it work just for them.

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Do you sometimes find you tell people things they know and they just completely forget it?  Or you think they understand but actually they have no idea what you’ve said and worst of all they’ve also got no idea about how to apply that information.

This can lead to all sorts of problems, as you might be expecting a certain outcome in a specific time window but unfortunately the reality is it doesn’t happen.

You could be in a situation where you have given somebody important information and the standards you expected for that work. You’re expecting them to act on the information and they just don’t.  They do absolutely nothing with that information or that knowledge or perhaps they potentially do that work to an inferior standard.

And that’s a real shame because it’s a waste of your time and it’s also a waste of their time.  It means that either you’re going to have to repeat the message that you have already given them or alternatively you are going to have to do the work yourself because it’s not at the standard that you were expecting it to be at.

Would you agree that this is a waste of resources?

These situations create a massive waste of your time and it’s highly frustrating and I’m sure you have better things to do than having to explain things time and time again.

Now as we have talked about previously in other videos, blogs and articles, there are many ways that individuals learn and then retain the information given. You should consider all these different learning techniques’ and learn a method that allows you to get your key messages across and impart the information required by targeting multiple different styles.

When you do that, people will assimilate and retain that information and knowledge given,  applying that material for themselves and achieving the goals set. Of course, then they are able to achieve the results that you are expecting and maybe then you don’t have to do all those late nights or all the early mornings.

So, when you’re thinking about how you’re going to impart knowledge, it needs to be in a way that makes it “sticky”, so people will remember it.  But not just remember it but also understand how to utilise it. You need to be thinking at about six different training techniques that need to be part of that knowledge transfer conversation.

One of those six key techniques is to use analogies.

Analogies are great because they allow people to be able to relate something that they’re currently doing or that they know today with something that you want them to do or know tomorrow. If you then bring these two aspects together correctly they can associate the two straight away as they have a reference point that works for them, it’s already part of their mindset.

It’s a little bit like cooking. You will not know every single recipe in the book but you’ve probably got a good idea about doing one or two things.  So, for instance, taking the example of cooking a bacon sandwich, this is very similar to cooking a sausage sandwich. So, you could use the analogy of cooking a bacon sandwich which they know how to make to then give them similar instructions for creating a good sausage sandwich. These kinds of analogies work very well.

Now when you start to think about things in a broader sense or when you get to a more complicated subject area, you may need to break the knowledge down into smaller steps and smaller simpler analogies. So, for instance, you might be looking at how can you associate the act of trading stocks and shares and what it feels like to be a trader. You could use an analogy for being in a relationship.

You know when you get into a relationship at first everything’s really good.  Everything is really high and you know where everything’s going.  You’re bouncing along quite happily for a while and then you have that rocky moment, something that you don’t quite enjoy or it’s not quite the way you want it to be.  But you stick with it because they become your project.

You’re going to make sure you can fix the issues and then everything’s going to work fine again. Then the relationship may take some more bumps but you’ve been with them for so long it’s kind of a long-term investment so you need to stick with it.  And before long if things keep going downwards, you might find yourself in a relationship that you really didn’t want to be in and before that point arrives you really should have got out, but how many people do?  It’s the same with stocks and shares.

You can see how you can relate one kind of experience to another no matter how different and diverse they are, but first, you should find those common experiences – the ones that most people have already had so you can then relate the two together to in an analogy.

Do you want to understand how to make knowledge “sticky”, and to get that key information across to as many different people as possible?  By understanding the Six different techniques that need to be part of that knowledge transfer conversation, you can achieve the results that you’re looking for.  Or are you just going to continue to do what you are doing now, working longer and longer hours to get everything done?

As Benjamin Franklin once said, “An Investment in knowledge pays the best interest!”