StoryQuest Blog

Recently, a Fortune 500 company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their global sales force to a conference. They loaded everyone up with company messages, product information and sales tactics from their top performers. Their IT staff uploaded a library of PowerPoint presentations, podcasts and video of the event onto the company web portal. The problem? After 2 weeks they found that only the smallest percentage of their people spent any time reviewing it. For the others, it was as though that event never happened.

Ever happened to you?

After the conference, the company found that only 20% of their people retained and utilized what they’d learned and made improvements in their sales results. Despite the incredible investment to get everyone together, to bring in great speakers and trainers, and then to invest in the technology to make it all available afterwards, they saw very little return on their investment.

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You can give a presentation that’s a dazzling display of information and your vast intellectual knowledge, but when all is said and done, people remember the stories.

Why do people remember stories but no other information?

Studies about how adults learn show that memory is formed when a person’s attention is engaged over a sustained period of time, and it is enhanced when auditory, visual and kinesthetic senses are stimulated.

In his book, The Owners Manual for the Brain, Pierce J. Howard, Ph.D., explains how memory is formed. The immediate memory is like a buffer area that can hold thousands of pieces of data for two seconds or less. The short-term memory is a like a broker that selects chunks of data to remember, but it takes about eight seconds of attention to add one new chunk of short-term memory. A new chunk of short-term memory becomes long-term memory when your attention is engaged over a sustained period of time.

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