If I could encourage L&D professionals to make just one New Year’s resolution that would be easy to keep, it would be this:
Stop focusing on attention spans and start focusing on a lack of tolerance for boring content.
We keep being told that attention spans are getting shorter – one report I read recently, likened the average Gen Z’s attention span to that of a goldfish.
But people do not have a lower attention span. What they have is a lower tolerance for boredom.
And those are two very different things.
Think about it: Films are getting longer. One study I looked at concluded that the average film is 10 minutes longer than in the 1970s and 15 minutes longer than they were in the 1980s. (And as much as 40 minutes longer than they were in the 1930s.)
But it’s not just films that can engage an audience for longer. We all know those people who will binge-watch an entire box set in one sitting. And don’t get me started on gaming, where people can spend hours, totally engrossed, oblivious to everything going on around them. (Championship Manager was like a drug to me back in the day. You’ve no idea how many wasted evenings it took to get Carlisle United into the Premiership!)
And that’s the other thing. This isn’t just a ‘Gen Z’ thing. I can’t be the only one lumbered with a different label who will fast forward adverts whenever possible, who flips from app to app like a dizzy bee, who gets easily distracted by my phone or iPad at any time I’m not engaged, and who finds it difficult to focus on anything remotely boring?
So, why do we have a lower threshold when it comes to boredom?
The big change of course is choice.
Remember when we’d all sit in front of the TV watching programmes we didn’t want to watch, just because they were the best of three options? Who, of my generation, didn’t watch Flash Gordon or Harold Lloyd on BBC2 when they were kids, just because it was the only way to avoid the boring news?
Remember how we endured all the advert breaks without skipping through them?
Remember how we’d sit through PowerPoint heavy presentations, stifling yawns and trying to keep our eyes open? (That can’t just have been me?)
Honestly, if I had to endure some of those presentations now, I’m sure I’d either be on my phone doing something else, or I’d have walked out. These days I’m very selective about events I attend. One way to be absolutely sure I won’t attend is to use the word ‘webinar’.
Because life is too short to have to endure that sort of mundanity.
The myth of a low attention span matters because it has fuelled and excused a rush towards bite size training, which has, in many cases created a self-fulfilling prophecy that has made the situation worse.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with bite-size training of course – a lot of our best modules can be facilitated in under an hour.
The problem is that shorter training sessions often lead to ‘learning’ that is ever more passive. In a lot of training that I witness today, there is even less engagement than there was 20 years ago, and less opportunity for the learner to explore issues or share their input, yet alone have fun, feel excited or find their own answers to the challenges and problems they face.
Too often, the false argument of a low attention span has been used to cut costs and put the blame for poor quality learning on the audience, when it should fall fairly and squarely on those designing the training.
The truth is we should be focusing on designing training that not just involves learners but actively engages them at a physical and emotional level. On designing training that grabs and holds people’s attention. For this, we don’t need more 15-minute PowerPoint presentations, or tick-box e-learning. We need learning activities that are different, extraordinary, funny, entertaining and which create real light bulb moments for the learners who experience them. Activities like
Building Engagement,
Murder at Glasstap Grange,
Alien Invasion (available as a
free sample),
Witches of Glum, or any of the near 1,000 like them that populate
Trainers’ Library.
When was the last time you or your learners were truly excited? I mean really excited both during the process of learning and when thinking about what they could do with the learning afterwards.
If the answer isn’t the last time you facilitated learning, then why not pop along to a
Showcase Workshop or
Discovery Day and experience some of our more unusual activities first hand.