Train Scenarios, Not Features: How Storytelling Reduces Cognitive Load and Improves Memory Retention
From software training to learning foreign languages, real scenarios are more effective for improving memory retention and reducing cognitive load than lists. If you want your audience to retain the information you are conveying, stories, scenarios, and real-world examples are the most effective training techniques and strategies for delivering impactful presentations. TL;DR: Avoid using lists in your presentations.
“People do not learn from lists. They learn from stories.”
This was a throwaway line from a consultant giving a lecture on how to craft presentations. Much of what she had to offer was unremarkable, as witnessed by the fact that I cannot remember any of it. But this one admonition has stayed with me ever since. I am reminded of it every time I see big globs of information presented as a list of items, or bullets, as if audiences were able to memorize these on sight.
Speaking specifically of training and demonstration, lists appear most often in the form of the enumeration of features. Software demonstrations are perhaps the most egregious example of this. Presenters routinely “demonstrate” a software product by going through its features, one by one (“You can do this, you can do this, you can also do this…”). Sometimes this tour is guided, with an agenda; sometimes the tour is quite random, driven by whatever happens to pop into the demonstrator’s head (“Oh, wait, there is this other feature I wanted to show you…”).
Photoshop is a complex piece of software, containing around seventy different tools for manipulating digital images. Very few people taken through a list of seventy tools in any sequence are going to remember more than a tiny fraction of what they are shown. Because people do not learn from lists. They will have learned very little about how to actually use Photoshop to manipulate images. Because no one who actually uses Photoshop to manipulate images does that by running through a list of features. They apply the tools that they know are appropriate to a specific scenario they have in mind (“Suppose we wanted to take this image of Abraham Lincoln, remove his beard, and make him look like he was the OG Rastafarian”) to get a result they are looking for.
A parallel to foreign language learning is appropriate here: no one learns to converse in a foreign language by being presented with lists of words. In the best language instruction [ The best, in my opinion, being the Pimsleur program from Simon & Schuster. Not a partner, just a fan.] vocabulary words are introduced in the context of a scenario—an imagined interaction (examples: buying an English-language newspaper in a shop; getting directions to the train station) in which those words are meaningful and necessary. Because we learn a foreign word most readily when we need to use that word. Why do you think “Where are the toilets” is one of the first (sometimes the only) phrases any foreign tourist learns?
It may be theoretically possible to teach someone all of Photoshop’s seventy features eventually, but that is not the point of a training or a demonstration. Rather, the point is to show an audience how those features would be used to accomplish something the audience actually wants to do. Simply enumerating features puts what is known as a cognitive load on the audience—the mental work of figuring out how they would use what they are being shown.
Dealing with that cognitive load degrades their ability to see what they could do with the tool. I once watched a software vendor demonstrate a piece of document-assembly software to a room full of attorneys. They did a great job of walking the audience through the steps to generate a series of real estate conveyancing documents. Worked great for the real estate attorneys in the room, but the other attorneys were at a loss: “We don’t do real estate conveyancing. How would this be useful to us?” The real estate scenario was unfamiliar to the other attorneys, so they failed to see how the features would work in their scenarios. The demonstration was lost on them.
The most effective form of training for novice problem solvers is: worked examples. Worked examples are effectively stories. In other words, scenarios.
So—in any training or demonstration, resist the urge to simply list, enumerate, or walk through features or items of information that you want to get across. Focus instead on guiding audiences through actual problem-solving steps, working on (preferably scripted) realistic scenarios. This leverages mental models that the audience already understands of how they would use the software or the tool or the information. This is what enables audiences to internalize what you are telling them, rather than simply forgetting it because they don’t have a story to fit it into.