Giant or fraudster – who’s shoulders are you standing on?

I ran a training workshop in 2005 for the team that was about to embark on a massive market communication endeavour at BETT, one of the the UK’s largest technology trade shows.

The project team involved about 12 people, who came from a mixture of product, sales and marketing backgrounds  and as the project director I really wanted them to focus on the commercial impact we were seeking to have. And so I set the scene with insights into how to engage people in an exhibition environment and how to ensure they remembered this afterwards. This latter point was most important given we were engaging buyers, specifiers and influencers months and sometimes even years before they would actually go on to buy the technology.

I looked for interesting sources about how to embed a memory and found someone who published some insights  based on Dale’s cone of experience which went a bit like this:

Apparently, you remember:

• 10% of what you Read;
• 20% of what you hear
• 30% of what you see
• 90% of what you say and do

The source seemed credible so I went on to impress on my team the importance of active engagement and to design as many experiential opportunities as possible.

Have you also found yourself using these percentages? Well like me, you may be surprised to know that these percentages have no substance whatsoever. In fact they are a fiction, invented and adopted by teachers and in wider communication fields for the past few decades. And whilst intuitively it makes sense, there is absolutely no substantiation whatsoever for them.

I felt supremely embarassed. Worse, I used them for many years and debated their application with others  until I discovered the truth. So when I attended a seminar at my daughter’s school a few years later only to find a hugely experienced teacher also using this ‘science’ to guide the support they gave pupils at GCSE, I felt obliged to mention it. It’s at times like this that the truth can be very uncomfortable…

The story of how this happened is very well told here but it transpires that this falsehood has been perpetuated for a long time. The danger of course is that when something is printed as fact, it can take a long time to stop others from running away with it, if ever.

Luckily, the trade shows the team executed over the next three years achieved the result we wanted: SMART went on to become global market leader, Turning Point now has over 5o% of its market and Steljes profited handsomely as a result. But I learned an important lesson about bad science, the importance of going to the ‘source’ and the need for robust interrogation of supposed facts.

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