Ebbinghaus or the Curves on why we just keep forgetting

Recently I came across the Ebbinghaus Curve aka the Forgetting Curve - interesting because my boss oftens laments  about how people can be trained in an improved SOP or new process, and then after a year or so they seem to have forgotten, and there is a risk of quality issues.

And to be honest, if someone catalogs a complex list of instructions on how to drive to a distant location, I find it often just doesn't gel with me. I much prefer simple written instructions, with the added visual component of a street directory. So far I haven't done much with GPS systems either to be honest.

So I've been intrigued by Nick Milton of Knoco Stories, who for years has been running a training program called the Bird Island Exercise, which is all about remembering & forgetting. Recently I re-discovered one of Nick's posts on his Bird Island Exercise from a year ago - where he shared the following insights :

"This result reinforces recognition of the frailty of human memory as a long term knowledge store, and therefore the need to support that memory through some sort of capturing and recording. Even 6 months is too long to leave knowledge in memory alone. We need to be capturing it as we go, even as an aide memoire, otherwise we lose it.


And when we come to use it again, we find we retain just enough to be dangerous."

Nick Milton also shared more on the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve in his The Gorilla Illusions post - by the way have you ever heard of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment ?

I also liked Nick's post on The Self Aware Organisation - it seems to resonate with many of the concepts in Professor James Reason's High Performance Organizations.

And around the same time of Nick's Remembering & Forgetting post, Harold Jarche also shared his thoughts on Ebbinghaus & the Forgetting Curve - Learning & Forgetting - on how much we remember after training & memorisation - and how quickly we can lose it.

Professor James Reason has also had some interesting thoughts on Human Errors - which seem to accord with the Forgetting Curve as shared in my organization's OHS awareness sessions. 

Some of these ideas are also echoed in a preso by ACTKM's David Williams "How do you get people to read and understand stuff?" - it's on Slideshare - which holds some very interesting preso's on Knowledge Management which are freely  available for download. David's thoughts are salient when one considers the increasing volume, length & complexity of SOP's - Standards Operating Procedures - as they try to cover every possible scenario. 


Then Benedict Carey (NYT) reviewed ideas that turn traditional thought on studying, learning & retention on its head.


I have to review my organization's procedure for writing standard procedures - so there could be some good inspiration in there, for what is arguably quite a dry subject, but nonetheless very crucial. 


I've always liked the Gunning Fog approach to understandability of one's writing - some find it too geeky with its equation for simplicity/complexity of writing.

I find it interesting because of the strong focus on Corporate "Storytelling" in Knowledge Management circles in Australia in recent years as opposed to CMS - Content Management Systems.  In fact CMS can really support SME's (Subject Matter Experts) to effectively manage their  PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) systems - for more effective recall & Knowledge Sharing, and so to share via tools such as Corporate "Storytelling". My organization's SSO's (Significant Safety Occurrence shared stories & learnings) are in fact a good example of embedded Corporate Storytelling in my opinion.

See my Diigo Shared Bookmarks & Google Reader RSS feed items for more Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve links.

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