This posting was supposed to be just about memory.
But then, I received an interesting e-mail from one of the web-based “information repositories” I subscribe to, www.ScienceOfStrategy.Org.
They built an experimental Flash-based introductory course on the principles contained in Sun Tzu “The Art of War”.
And the first section of their new training material(free, for the time being) is worth more than many books discussing how Sun Tzu or Machiavelli can be applied in business.
But how does this relate to memory?
Well, go online, follow the course and pass the tests, and you will understand why.
Anyway, if you are too lazy to spend 30/45 minutes testing yourself online… keep reading.
Memory is often considered as an indipendent skill, as if we were just human databases.
In my experience and observations in business (along with tons of readings that started decades ago), you can learn the basic skills, but, unless you have a purpose, you just end up like a circus phenomenon.
If memory is associated with purpose, it creates a framework that actually speeds up your learning.
That’s why, anytime I had to train or coach somebody, I tried to identify at least the following elements:
- Why: the overall purpose
- When: the target time when the new skills should be available for use
- Where: are the trainee going to use the skills alone? with coaching support? or just with supervision?
Of course, I willingly removed all the “cost” issues: how much time is available, total budget for training and supervision/coaching, etc.
Because, unless you have the answer to the first three questions, you can slice and dice as much you want- but it is a typical chicken-and-egg problem.
Assuming that you have defined the framework within which the skills are to be delivered, you can then identify the “how”.
A small example from my past, as usual- from 1993, but the human brain did not change that much, since then, despite what some people say 
I was supposed to train project managers and business analysts on something called “data modelling” (roughly- how information is related to other information).
But before that- you need to understand how to extract information from an interview, and how to build a graphical representation, a kind of map, of the information.
The traditional way? To build a boring theoretical exercise, where people read something absolutely irrelevant to what they do everyday.
Then, you ask them to repeat what you tell them to do.
And, frankly, it is really boring to learn something only because you are told to- and not because you can relate it to something that you know.
The older you get, the more interesting is when you can learn by “jumping” between known points, not simply by acting as a copying machine.
But human memory and learning skills are flexible. And linked to needs.
Did you notice that professional bar tenders can remember, after years, what you used to drink, and in which order?
And when you try to teach something new to and adult, say, to cook a new cake, (s)he instinctively tries to refers to something already “stored” inside the brain?
It is part of our basic makeup- the way we evolved.
My approach to teaching new skills is therefore between two opposites, using whatever is more useful (or using both at different stages).
The first, logical approach, following what I wrote above is to augmenting on something already known.
This usually speeds up the learning, also if requires some “tweaking” on the delivery of the training. Once completed, you come back, and fix the small details that you had to compromise to make the new knowlege fit in the old framework.
But sometimes the second approach is more efficient, as you have to (temporarily) “burn the boats”, and move forward with a new framework, before coming back and building the references to the existing knowledge.
Interestingly, this second approach is more useful when the people attending your lessons have a different background or level of experience, as each one of them will actually build up their own references to what was their prior experience.
Coming back to the business analysis and data modeling example.
They already knew roughly how to do understand what the customer needs, they just needed to learn a different and more structured way of doing it.
I had prepared a theoretical exercise from their environment (banking), but I was lucky, as not too long before the training a banking organization in Basel had published new suggested rules on how to assign responsibility to banking personnel in preventing money laundering.
And, even luckier, an economic newspaper had published an article that was actually summarizing the rules and their potential impact on the banking business.
Therefore, the first part was simple: the business analysis was done using the article as if it were the minutes of an interview, applying the new business analysis framework.
The second part, data modeling, was a little bit trickier.
If you ever did an IQ or attitudinal test, you maybe remember those tests with shapes, showing, say, three cubes, and asking what should be the fourth one, to be chosen by a short list of potential answers.
As soon as you live school, if you work in an office business environment, usually you are required to process information verbally (listening, talking, writing), and sometimes also your basic mathematical skills are tested.
But unless you work in some specific environments, you quickly lose the capability to process pictures in your mind, like rotating cubes etc.
Well, there are a couple of exceptions, of course: if you play videogames that require to manipulate visual forms fast (also the old, humble, Tetris).
In the case of my customers, mind that it was 1993, well before Internet and the widespread use of videogames, mobiles, etc.
I did a quick test at the end of a day, asking them to use pencil and eraser, to informally assess their shape-processing capabilities.
Despite most of them having a degree in mathematical sciences, the day-by-day business needs did not require any form of “spatial intelligence”.
The solution? Adopt the second approach.
I asked all of them to bring the following day blank sheets of paper, paper scissors, and pencils or color markers.
The exercise? Write phrases in the form subject-verb-complement, describing the information received from the interview.
Obviously, with few steps in-between, to ensure that each one was using the same starting material.
Once they had cut the “slices” of information, I asked them to position on paper, by rotating and overlapping the “slices”, to identify the relationships between the slices.
And then, only then, to use a blank sheet, and reproduce the assembled slices into a coherent graphical representation.
The result? About ten years later, one of them met me while I was in the same company for a completely different activity, and reminded me of that story.
The way to keep the new skills? Exercise on the basics. Until it becomes a second nature.
In that case- until it becomes faster to rotate and overlap pictures in your mind than writing-and-slicing-and-rotating on paper.
And the strategy part I was referring to at the beginning and in the title?
Well, if you read up to this point… you know it.
But remember: the more frameworks you collect and understand, the better and faster you become at assessing the evolution of the conditions in your environment.
And that, is definitely in the realm of strategy- also for personal purposes 
Have a nice week-end!
Tags: business, data, intelligence, learning, memory, model, spatial, strategy, teaching