🎓 If we only shower learners with knowledge – even with elegant visuals and eloquent delivery – we’re mostly activating just one thing:

The brain’s passive storage center — a place where information gets buried deep, like an old file on a forgotten hard drive.

🧠 But if learners actively rephrase and express knowledge in their own words, something powerful happens:

They activate the brain’s working memory — the center for accessible, usable knowledge.

The most effective way to trigger this?

👉 Speaking aloud with a learning partner.

Explaining what we’ve just learned in our own words is one of the simplest and strongest ways to lock knowledge into your active memory.

Because true learning doesn’t happen when we hear something.

It happens when we make it our own.

Curious how we put this into practice? 👉 https://lnkd.in/eGVKjwnr 

Recently, I attended an online marketing training with 30 other entrepreneurs from across Europe.

The training was well-designed, beautifully visualized, and perfectly structured.

Over the course of 2 hours, only the 5 most extroverted participants dared to ask a question.

Afterwards, we received a detailed PDF with all the key information.

💭 What did I actually implement into my daily business?

Nothing.

Why not?

Because I would’ve needed to sit down for another two hours just to figure out how to translate the insights into actionable steps that truly fit my context.

So I got back to my other tasks — and like most people, I had forgotten the core of the training within two weeks.

🎯 How can we design trainings that actually lead to action?

Your free assessment 👉 https://lnkd.in/eGVKjwnr 

Socrates and the Lost Art of Learning: Giving Birth to Knowledge

In ancient Greece, Socrates made a powerful observation:

💡 Knowledge cannot simply be transferred – it must be born within the learner.

He compared his method to midwifery:

The teacher isn’t the one who “delivers” knowledge — but the one who helps it emerge from the learner.

This is exactly what happens in a well-designed training:

When participants actively formulate their own application ideas, they give birth to understanding.

As Goethe put it:

👉 “If you want to understand something, I advise you to talk about it.”

Or, in the words of Dieter Bohlen:

👉 “How should I know what I think if I haven’t said it yet?”

Instead of “filling” participants with content, great training sharpens their thinking.

Through structured partner exercises, learners gain clarity, confidence, and actionability —

just like in the Socratic art of midwifery.

Curious how this can be done at scale? 👉 https://lnkd.in/eGVKjwnr

Learn to forget or learn to remember?

We don´t need to get informed, we already have all the information in our pockets.

So it's time to get skilled – finally.

A famous provider of online training material just mentioned in an interview that according to his own data only 15% of his buyers of learning materials look at it after they made the purchase.

The percentage of customers who will be so lucky to implement the knowledge into their daily life will be significantly less.

95% percent of all knowledge that is presented will be forgotten after two weeks which is the result of a study done by the US national training laboratories. Or how much do you remember of a speech from a year ago? If you did not apply it afterward with a lot of initiative, it will be less than 1%.

Let's work with the Brain, not against it.

Our brain doesn´t work like an empty bucket that can be filled with information.

Only if learners use their own words to digest the information 90% of it will be remembered long term.

But how can a workshop be organized so that all participants have the room to establish the information in their own words?

If there are 30 participants and they all take only two minutes for questions, it would total 60 minutes of extra time. If instead, in those 60 minutes these 30 participants elaborate on the subject in pairs, the active time individually for each participant is increased 15 times from two to 30 minutes each.

For your internal training, you use three didactical elements: speech, individual work, and pair work. In order to scale your own workshop product offline and online you use the same three elements – structure them in a clear minute-by-minute plan, test it, improve it, until it works perfectly, and then scale it.

 IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place. The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one.