Short Stories

Here’s a piece of research that might be more interesting than Ebbinghaus: students who read only summaries of chapters recalled more information than those who read entire chapters. Not 60%. Not 80%. More. Imagine someone approaching you and suggesting that a one day training course could be reduced to a five minute video - and people would remember more? Where does it end? Can we reduce the 5 minute video to a 20 second video and improve learning still further?

Last night I attended an event hosted by RADA discussing their experience of reducing Hamlet to a one-hour performance, and parallels with simplification challenges in business. Full productions of Hamlet can run to 4 hours, so this represents something like a 75% reduction - not entirely dissimilar to the situation which we sometimes face in learning.

How would you do it? How would you reduce an experience that lasts 4 hours to one that lasts only one?

One question you might ask is ‘what’s your objective?’ Do you want people to retain the same quality of experience, or merely recall the same experience? What is the difference between the experience they have and the experience they remember? A lot, it turns out. In this TED talk  Kahnemann points out that what people experience and what they remember experiencing are two very different things. They tend to remember emotional peaks and the closing episode experience (e.g. anything surprising that happened during a meeting and how it ended). All the rest ends up on the cutting room floor.

So how about this as a starter for ten: you interview people exiting the four hour version of Hamlet and find out what they recall. Based on this, you reduce the play.  It might now last only ten minutes but people recall the same things – though as an experience it would seem fragmentary (not unlike some Hollywood movies I’ve seen recently). When I put this suggestion to the publisher sitting next to me, he remarked that people often buy a book not to read it, but to have it - and that ten minutes might not feel long enough for people to be able to say at dinner parties ‘we saw a production of Hamlet’. Part of the value of an experience is the role it plays in the story of our lives.

And now we come full circle: there is something quintessential about the storytelling nature of humans, but the format of those stories is changing. In this video Casey Neistat explains why Snapchat is killing Facebook  - it’s because it allows users to tell stories about themselves. Very short stories. And sitting there, watching the one hour version of Hamlet, it still seemed long.

I’m reminded of Milan Kundera’s assertion that whilst we like to think that somewhere in our brains we store every day of our lives – we do not. Instead we store only a few blurry snapshots – like scattered polaroids. And the rest we make up. We are constantly storifying our lives. But the cornerstones of these stories, the fabric of our lives, are these memorable moments: going to football matches as a child, the first day at school, our first date. Could we make our get-togethers a little more like this, I wonder?