Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman

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FIGURE 2.1 The human brain has a diverse set of inputs that contribute to your memories.

      Neuroscience has identified four theoretical stages of memory, which include sensory, working, intermediate, and long-term. Understanding working memory and intermediate memory is relevant to meetings, because these stages represent the most potential to turn thought into action.

      Working Memory

      You may be familiar with the term short-term memory. Depending on the research you read, the term working memory has replaced short-term memory in the vocabulary of neuro- and cognitive science. I’ll use the term working memory here. Designing meeting experiences to support the working memory of attendees will improve meetings.

      Working memory collects around 30 seconds of the things you’ve recently heard and seen. Its storage capacity is limited, and that capacity varies among individuals. This means that not everyone in a meeting has the same capacity to store things in their working memory. You might assume that because you remember an idea mentioned within the last few minutes of a meeting, everyone else probably will as well. That is not necessarily the case.

      You can accommodate variations in people’s ability to use working memory by establishing a reasonable pace of information. The pace of information is directly connected to how well aligned attendees’ working memories become. To make sure that everyone is on the same page, you should set a pace that is deliberate, consistent, and slower than your normal pace of thought.

      Sometimes, concepts are presented more quickly than people can remember them, simply because the presenter is already familiar with the details. Breaking information into evenly sized, consumable chunks is what separates a great presenter from an average (or bad) one. In a meeting, slower, more broken-up pacing allows a group of people to engage in constructive and critical thinking more effectively. It gets the same ideas in everyone’s head. (For a more detailed dive into the pace of content in meetings, see Chapter 3, “Build Agendas Out of Ideas, People, and Time.”)

      Theoretical models that explain working memory are complex, as seen in Figure 2.2.² This model presumes two distinct processes taking place in your brain to make meaning out of what you see, what you hear, and how much you can keep in your mind. Assuming that your brain creates working memories from what you see and what you hear in different ways, combining listening and seeing in meetings becomes more essential to getting value out of that time.

FIGURE 2.2 Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch’s Model of Working Memory provides context for the interplay between what we see and hear in meetings.

      In a meeting, absorbing something seen and absorbing something heard require different parts of the brain. Those two parts can work together to improve retention (the quantity and accuracy of information in our brain) or compete to reduce retention. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the research of Richard E. Meyer, where he has found that “people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone, but not all graphics are created equal(ly).”³ When what you hear and what you see compete, it creates cognitive dissonance. Listening to someone speaking while reading the same words on a screen actually decreases the ability to commit something to memory. People who are subjected to presentation slides filled with speaking points face this challenge. But listening to someone while looking at a complementary photograph or drawing increases the likelihood of committing something to working memory.

      Intermediate-Term Memory

      Your memory should transform ideas absorbed in meetings into taking an action of some kind afterward. Triggering intermediate-term memories is the secret to making that happen. Intermediate-term memories last between two and three hours, and are characterized by processes taking place in the brain called biochemical translation and transcription. Translation can be considered as a process by which the brain makes new meaning. Transcription is where that meaning is replicated (see Figures 2.3a and 2.3b). In both processes, the cells in your brain are creating new proteins using existing ones: making some “new stuff” from “existing stuff.”⁴

FIGURE 2.3 Biochemical translation (a) and transcription (b), loosely in the form of understanding a hat.

      Here’s an example: instead of having someone take notes on a laptop, imagine if Jane sketched a diagram that helped her make sense out of the discussion, using what was stored in her working memory. The creation of that diagram is an act of translation, and theoretically Jane should be able to recall the primary details of that diagram easily for two to three hours, because it’s moving into her intermediate memory.

      If Jane made copies of that diagram, and the diagram was so compelling that those copies ended up on everyone’s wall around the office that would be transcription. Transcription is the (theoretical) process that leads us into longer-term stages of memory. Transcription connects understanding СКАЧАТЬ