Why Do We Need To Eat The “elephant” One Bite At A Time? - LinkedIn

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Desmond Tutu once wisely said that “there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” What he meant by this is that everything in life that seems daunting, overwhelming, and even impossible can be accomplished gradually by taking on just a little at a time.

When teaching a child to tell time or tie their shoes by themselves, we break information that they need to know into smaller bite-sized pieces of information and repeat it until they have it memorized and then they can create their own muscle memory or reflexes in regards to the new information or process we introduced into their lives.

This same theory of teaching is also true for adults. With busy lives and short attention spans, the needs of business and particularly of learning on the job becomes something we don’t leave a lot of time for or make a priority. This is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing in the workplace. By sharing information and educating our teams on what’s coming down the pipes next or a new way of doing our business we are sabotaging ourselves into becoming stagnant, obsolete or out-of-date in our own business.

Have you ever heard anyone say, “a single day without learning something new is the day I’m dead!”. These people aren’t stupid or uneducated. They are truly enlightened because they know there is plenty that they don’t know; admitting it leaves them open to learn from everyone around them. These are also likely the most successful and advanced people you might already know. You don’t need a degree’s worth of knowledge in one go. Eventually you will get there by consuming information and using it to connect the dots between all the single pieces of information you have learned.

How you think through a process or address a situation is by taking steps. The same truth is in learning. The idiomatic proverb of consuming the elephant is to do something one step at a time, to do something in steps rather than all at once. This is the approach that all learning should take at any stage in life.

Too much information all at once is overwhelming. Too little information leaves you confused or frustrated, so now you need to determine what is the correct amount of information to give at one time. For each person that is different, so we aim for a middle balance when creating learning materials.

When chunking information, it is important to break information to consumable units that still make sense. It refers to the strategy of breaking down information into bite-sized pieces so the brain can more easily digest the new information. The reason the brain needs assistance is because working memory, which is where we manipulate information, holds only a limited amount of information at one time. Think of your computers RAM (memory) versus your computer’s hard drive which is used for large amounts of long-term storage. Ram is where you take a chunk of information and manipulate it or process. The same is true for human memory, or in this case working memory.

Here are the 4 steps I use in creating chunked learning materials.

Step 1: Start at the highest level.

Use a chunking strategy while determining the content hierarchy of a course. Determine how modules, lessons and topics will be organized into a logical and progressive order.

Start with large chunks of conceptually related content and use these as your modules. There are numerous organizational strategies, such as simple to complex, cause and effect, sequential, and so on.

Step 2: Modules into lessons into topics.

Divide modules into smaller related chunks and these will become your lessons. Continue with this process until content is broken down to the topic level. As you become more familiar with the content, fine tune the internal structure.

Step 3: Chunk at the screen level.

When you have a solid module-lesson-topic structure, organize the content so each screen consists of one chunk of related information. Depending on how you design, this could be at the topic level, at the detailed learning objective level or at the concept level. As a guiding rule, avoid introducing multiple topics, learning objectives or concepts at one time.

Step 4: Do a working memory check.

Throughout the process, think in terms of working memory. Do you really need to include all the content you have in front of you? If not, get rid of extraneous content. Less is more.

Will the chunk of content require the learner to hold more than a few things in memory at one time in order to understand it? If so, break it down again. Fortunately, the visuals and text in multimedia courses can lessen the demands on working memory.

This is normally when I am asked, what do you do if you have numerous topics that seem unrelated. If you have lots of unrelated facts, it is possible that this is extraneous content and you don’t need it. If you are certain these unrelated facts need to be included, find some way that they do relate to each other and connect them for the learner.

You must chunk the information in the opposite direction. Use any strategy that turns individual bits of information into meaningful chunks through a story, analogy or metaphor.

Working memory can hold five chunks of information as it is to hold five bits of information. It is just as easy to remember 5 letters as it is to remember 5 words. By grouping them together, small bits of information form a chunk and you will assist your learners in the process of learning that chunk.

We need to get away from overwhelming screens or pages of information. We need to abolish the standard corporate training room where employees converge for hours of spoon-fed teaching because that’s not the most effective way to teach or to learn. Smaller amounts of education or learning can only happen if the information is provided to the learner in smaller chunks that are easier to learn and remember in the long run. This also means that employees can take 5 minutes out of each workday to learn something new instead of a ½ each month to attend a classroom to be fed information. The overall ROI is that employees are more engaged, they retain more information and can accommodate new ideas and processes into their daily routines, thus making the training effective and worthwhile for them and the employer.

Look at some of your existing training and determine how this can be broken into smaller chunks to be consumed more easily by your team. Then make it the way to introduce something new the next time your design instructional materials.

S. "Mic" Michenfelder is an educational advocate through Instructional Facilitation, Instructional Design, e-Training Development and as a popular motivational Public Speaker for small and large events on a variety of subjects from accepting change, transitioning through change, changing mindset for personal and business growth, as well as technical subjects. Located in South-Western Ontario, Canada she has traveled to 63 (and counting) countries and worked with 8300+ happy clients. You can contact Mic through her LinkedIN profile.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmichenfelder

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Share 11 3 Comments Sepide Keshavarz 1y

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Great ideas 

Like Reply 1 Reaction Fiona Durie 2y

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Bruce! 🐘🤣

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