Five reasons anything is remembered
Late in the day, with slides to spare — he counted them out loud and grinned at us: "five more, is it okay?" — Martin ran the memory block fast, because we had been living it all week without the labels. Five reasons anything survives a training. Primacy: what you hear first, you remember. Recency: what you hear last. The middle is where content goes to fade — so structure your programme with the important points at the beginning and the end, which is the same physics that made GLOSS and OFF worth three minutes each, and the same curve Day 1's forgetting-curve post drew in numbers. Cognitive structures: items related to existing knowledge stick, because they have something to attach to. His practical version: always bring examples that dock to what people already know — childhood knowledge works on everyone, because school and university are in the deep, long memory even when last quarter's training is not. Over-emphasis: items emphasised in an outstanding manner stick, and he confessed to using it on us deliberately. The session-plan structure, constructive alignment, the outcome-method-assessment triangle — "if I tell this only one time, nobody will do it on Friday. If you want to see certain things happen, you must over-emphasise. Repeat, repeat, repeat." Hearing the week's repetitions named as a technique, retroactively, was like being shown the receipt. And appealing senses: the more senses engaged, the deeper the trace — the reason he spent years exploring VR for training, and why his practical bet for trainers now is AR, augmented reality: games layered onto the real world, "like Pokémon."
I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand
The retention slide hung on the Chinese proverb — I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand — a line usually traced back to the Confucian tradition, often to the philosopher Xunzi, and the most compact argument for active practice ever written. Martin's gloss was one sentence: "doing is more important than talking. If you want to increase learning, you need to do more." Which is, of course, the 20:80 rule from Day 1's lean-learning post arriving from a different direction — every framework in this course eventually converges on take the trainer off the stage. The supporting cast: mnemonics — and by this point in the week the course's own habit was visible, GLOSS, OFF, CODE, LACAV, ADDIE, a acronym for every doorway, each one a handle bolted onto a structure so it can be carried out of the room. Multi-sensory learning: engage more senses, remember more. And transfer of learning — the one that separates training from theatre: always move classroom learning toward real-world application, how would you do this at your workplace, because a skill that only works in the training room doesn't exist.
From attention to desire
Desire to learn is built in three escalating stages, and Martin had a worked example for each — mostly himself, working on us. Securing attention is the cheapest move in training: "Monday morning — chocolate. You give a few sweets, people create attention. Very simple." The KitKats from Day 1 were never about chocolate. Developing attention into interest is structural: the why-are-you-here round, the expectations exercise — every moment that connects the course to the participant's own goal converts attention into interest, because now the session is about them. And causing interest to become active desire runs on life examples. When he teaches lean six sigma, he doesn't argue that process improvement matters; he tells the story of the potato-chip factory where the exercise found six figures of optimisation potential. "Wow. Six figure. Good number. Then they understand — this is why you do this. I also want to find six-figure potential." The abstraction never motivates; the worked example with a number attached does. Underneath the three stages sits the ARCS model — Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction — John Keller's framework for designing motivation into learning rather than hoping it walks in with the participants. The supporting conditions filled the engagement slide: an inclusive environment where everyone can speak; a conducive one — not too hot, not too cold, good lighting, and he told on his own venue with delight: one Friday he arrived at 7:00 to find five nervous participants already there, sitting outside watching the pond, feeding bread to the fishes. A view can out-compete a trainer. Challenging but attainable activities — too easy is boring, too hard is demoralising. Aligned expectations, checked on day one. And social learning: peer-to-peer, engineered on purpose.
Case Study
designing memory into Mana Mana's SOP training
Our SOP training at Mana Mana is a masterclass in how forgetting happens. New front-desk staff get a two-hour onboarding walkthrough — a narrated tour of every procedure, check-in flow to lost-and-found, delivered once, in the middle of their overwhelming first day. Against today's five effects it is almost perfectly wrong: the critical procedures sit in the middle of the session where memory dies; nothing docks to anything the new hire already knows; nothing is emphasised above anything else, so everything is equally forgettable; one sense engaged — hearing — and zero doing. I hear, I forget: we have been running a forgetting machine and blaming the staff. The redesign, effect by effect. Primacy and recency: the two procedures that actually sink us when botched — deposit handling and the escalation call-tree — move to the first twenty minutes and get reprised in the last ten. The middle carries the tourable, low-stakes content. Cognitive structures: every procedure docks to something the hire already owns — check-in is introduced as "how you'd want your own hotel arrival to go, written down"; the escalation tree as "who you'd WhatsApp first at home when the aircon dies." Over-emphasis: deposit handling gets the Martin treatment — said on day one, drilled on day two, quizzed on day three, repeat, repeat, repeat, because if everything is emphasised nothing is. Appealing senses and active practice: the walkthrough becomes a walk-through — the trainee performs three real check-ins under supervision on day one, including one staged difficult guest, played with commitment by whichever DM is on shift. And transfer: the final assessment is not a quiz but a live shift segment, because the outcome verb was always operate, not recall. The desire ladder maps too. Attention: the onboarding now opens with the one-star review that nearly ended us and the five-star review that names a front-desk staffer personally — nothing secures a new hire's attention like seeing the job's blast radius. Interest: their own first-week goals, asked and written down, Martin's why-are-you-here transplanted. Active desire: the number that does what six-figure potato chips did — showing the trainee how review scores move payroll, because the abstraction never motivates and the worked example with a number attached does.
Reflections
This block was the course quietly explaining itself. The KitKats were attention-securing. The acronyms were mnemonics. The relentless repetition of constructive alignment was over-emphasis, applied with intent. The flying horses were active practice. The week has been a live demonstration wearing a lecture as a disguise, and today Martin handed over the annotated script. What stays with me is the shift in where responsibility sits. "They didn't retain it" is a sentence about learners; every effect on today's list is a sentence about design. Primacy is a scheduling decision. Over-emphasis is an editorial decision. Doing-over-talking is a methods decision. If the participants forgot it, the honest question is almost never what is wrong with them — it is which of these five levers did I leave unpulled. The forgetting curve from Day 1 told me decay is the default; today's block was the instruction manual for fighting it on purpose.