If you’re a fan of classic sitcoms, you might remember Mad About You. There was one episode in particular in which one of the main characters, Paul Buchman (played by Paul Riser), a filmmaker, is tasked by Yoko Ono to make a film about—get this—the wind. Paul spends the better part of the episode spiraling, trying to figure out how to capture the invisible.
I bet many learning and development professionals (L&D) have felt Paul’s pain.
So often, L&D professionals are asked to take abstract concepts, dry compliance objectives, and ambiguous soft skills and make them tangible and compelling. You do your best to point your proverbial camera at the empty air, then wonder why your audience is deeply underwhelmed.
To make learning sticky, you have to stop trying to film the wind and start filming the things the wind moves. In a recent webinar, Can’t Get You Outta My Head: Techniques for Sticky Learning, Danielle Wallace, CEO and Chief Learning Strategist at Beyond the Sky, explored how the multibillion-dollar world of advertising can teach us to show the impact rather than the info.
Add a little drama, people.
Paul Buchman eventually realized that you can’t just film air; you have to film what the air touches: the laundry flapping on the clothesline or the umbrella being turned inside out. In L&D, our default wind equivalent is a stock photo of a person at their computer. That’s invisible… and boring. To really make a message stick, you have to add a little drama. Take the infamous “this is your brain on drugs” campaign, for example. Do you remember that one? I sure do. It was convincing. It wasn’t a lecture on neurobiology; it was a video of an egg (symbolizing your brain) sizzling in a hot skillet (symbolizing drugs), to demonstrate how drugs affect the brain. Any questions? No, sir. That is an analogy that engages the senses and packs a punch.
When you design your next module, don’t just point the camera at the rulebook. If you are teaching about risk, show the shield under pressure. If you’re teaching about communication, show the bridge being built. When the visual is the impact, the learner doesn’t have to guess which way the wind is blowing.
Less is more, though.
In advertising, copy is a precious resource. There’s only so much room on a bottle of Olay, for example. In L&D, we tend to treat our “canvas” as infinite (unless we’re specifically targeting microlearning), which tends to “bloat” courses and make them feel more like a five-hour director’s cut of a wind film.
To avoid the bloat, apply these three advertising-coded rules to your copy:
- The keep-it-simple rule. Ruthlessly eliminate filler words. If a sentence works without it, leave it out. Words like really, very, and that or are often
verydeletable. - The TMI rule. If the learner doesn’t need it to reach the goal, remove it. It’s just extra noise. It could live in a “resources” document available for those wanting a deep dive.
- The 20% rule. Once you’ve written your script, act like a vicious editor and delete 20% of it.
Your copy should have stopping power. It should be so clear that a learner can grasp the intent in the same one second a driver uses to read a billboard at 70 mph.
Make it weird.
Empathy, humor, and failure are other powerful tools advertisers use to create a connection. There’s a campaign that encourages smokers to quit by telling them to fail hard and often. By normalizing the difficulty of the journey, the campaign removed the shame and stigma associated with quitting.
In training, we can use the same tools. Humor, when tied directly to the learning, can create a dopamine hit that aids in retention. Don’t be afraid to go there, but it has to have a point. If the learner remembers the hook but forgets the why, you’ve missed the mark. The best training uses characters and realistic scenarios that make the learner feel seen, just like the wind when it comes into contact with something you can see.
Get sticky with ELB Learning.
Creating sticky learning requires more than a camera; it takes vision for how to make the invisible visible. At ELB, our custom learning solutions team specializes in this exact blend of instructional design and creative storytelling. We help you move past boring training by helping you build immersive, fun, scenario-based experiences that drive real behavior change.
Watch the full webinar below. And if you’re ready to stop filming the wind and start creating training that moves people, contact us.
_______________
Disclaimer: The ideas, perspectives, and strategies shared in this article reflect the expertise of our featured speaker, Danielle Wallace. Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn to explore more of her insights.
