“There’s an age-old saying that ‘you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” says AmyK Hutchens, CEO of amyk inc. (www.amyk.com), a business strategy firm. Similarly, “you can’t force people to learn, but you can get them excited about it. You can get them thirsty. When they’re thirsty, they’ll drink.”
She identifies “six critical components of brain persuasion” that help create thirsty, engaged learners.
First, provocative questions (e.g., “What if I could give you a tool that could change training for you forever?”) show learners that the training will be beneficial to them and also make them curious.
Provocative statements, the second component, also grab learners’ attention but usually add a fact or figure, according to Hutchens, who gives this example: “I’m going to teach you something within the first 10 minutes that will shift your perspective on training for the rest of your life.”
Partial information is the third component and includes “dangling” information in front of learners, such as—in the case of a train-the-trainer class—promising to provide three questions that trainers should ask themselves before training sessions, she explains.
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Fourth, glimpses of value involve giving “real-world examples” of how others have successfully used the material you will cover, she says.
The fifth component, momentum, deals with “reducing the learner’s risk,” Hutchens says. For example, by telling learners about other people who participated in an exercise you are about to use, such as “I just did this last week with 250 CFOs in a room,” you show learners that the training offers “good information, and it’s safe to buy into it.”
The sixth component, novelty and exclusivity, is “all about the invitation. It’s an invitation for the learner to be part of something that’s really special,” says Hutchens. For example, although 1 million people have used a particular assessment tool, you can tell learners that they will be part of a very small percentage of workers worldwide who have the opportunity to use it.
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In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll look at how to keep employees engaged in training on a limited budget and describe a low-cost, out-of-the-box HR training resource that’s available now from BLR.