One of the unseen enemies of learning is dropout.
Clients get into a course very excited to learn. Then they go off a cliff. They don’t show up as often, if they show up at all. This dropout factor isn’t a new problem. It has existed for hundreds of years, but it’s only recently that we’ve understood how to get better results while spending less time.
Let’s find out how to quell and even get rid of the dropout factor once and for all.
Right click to save this episode.
Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
Henry Ford is famously known for speeding up car production.
What he's less known for is losing employees. Before Ford started the mechanized car production, it took between 12 to 14 hours a day per car. I know this sounds like a very quick turnaround, but it's a lot.
This activity was considered very slow. It needed skilled workers, and everyone was frustrated. And when the Ford Moving Assembly was started, that time of 12 hours, it dropped dramatically.
For one, the new method didn't need extremely skilled workers, and yet they were able to put together a car in barely 150 minutes. This change got production time by almost 80 to 90 percent.
However, it also had one big downside.
The work was repetitive and mostly exhausting. The Ford Motor Company kept losing workers. It was at this point that Edsil Ford, Henry's son, put forward the idea of a five-day work week.
Until that point, it was common to have just one day off, and the five-day work week was considered revolutionary. People assumed that workers would get lazy if they took two whole days off.
And so they didn't change because they were kind and helpful.
They changed because it was going to make a big difference to their business. In this move of having two days off, it did reduce total output by a tiny bit, but more importantly, it reduced fatigue.
Fewer mistakes were made on the job, and Ford stopped losing workers. Eventually, despite output reducing a smidgen, the production per worker increased once the five-day work week was introduced.
This article is about why less is more, and you know this, you've heard it a million times before.
Less is more, less is more, less is more. But it's one thing to hear something like this, and quite another thing to implement it in your business. Because we had our own battle when we conducted our courses, and we've been conducting courses all the way from 2005.
And when we first started training clients 20 years ago, they had to do assignments for six days a week. Now this seemed logical both to me and to the clients.
They were busy professionals.
We had a lot to cover. If we dawdled over the duration of the course, we'd achieve a lot less. Hence, six days seemed perfectly logical. Nothing went wrong at first. In fact, nothing went wrong at all.
Our story wasn't similar to Ford's. Despite the strain of having to run a business, to do a course, clients stuck to their goal. It helped that our courses were often called the toughest in the world.
It therefore attracted people who were determined to get to the other side. Six days was a lot, but no one was willing to throw in the towel. Then for no particular reason, I changed it to just five days. But the first change was not for the clients, it was for me. Because in the past, I'd be exhausted after a course.
How exhausted?
I would barely be able to speak a sentence for a week. I would sometimes be like this. We have to…
It was like my brain had just stopped after the course. As you know, after a course, we tend to go on a month-long holiday. But for the first week, I'd just be sleeping, often just looking at the ceiling.
It's only on the second week of our holiday that I'd come out of my hibernation. And you'd think, well, if you covered the course in six days, and then you did it in just five, it's not gonna make such a big difference. But it did.
It felt a lot less tiring.
When you have one day to recover, it's just one day. And in that day, you don't know what can happen. There could be other housework, there could be duties, there could be any amount of chaos. So sometimes you have zero days to recover. And having two days was enough of a buffer to relax, maybe not sleep that much, but to just wind down a bit.
During the course, I was a better teacher. And after the course, the recovery wasn't more than a couple of days. And we never got a chance to ask the clients because they went through their six day a week course.
But I bring up this fact with current clients.
And I say, what if this course were to go for six days out of seven? And they think I'm completely insane because five days seems like a lot every week, especially when you're running a business, but especially when you're dealing with life, just life takes so much out of you.
They think I'm completely bonkers to even make such a suggestion. They don't know that we had these courses running in the past over six days. So we tried another experiment.
We shrunk the working time to just four days. The clients still had to show up five days a week. However, the assignments were scheduled for just four days. On the fifth day, they get to read, they get to watch some videos, but mostly to visit other groups.
So they're all in groups and they visit each other every day, but they don't get the chance to visit other groups. It just takes too much bandwidth to do your work, to look at the group's work.
So it's on the fifth day that they get to travel a bit within the groups. And they see what the others are up to, so they get ideas, they see the mistakes. And this will not be possible if we had five days of work.
We had six days of work, brought it down to five days, and now they have assignments for just four days.
What's been the result of this two-decade experiment? The first and the most obvious result is a chunky reduction in exhaustion. Exhaustion is pointless, even if you're someone who loves their work.
With the tiredness greatly reduced, we started to look at output. We started to look at the results the clients were getting. In the cartooning course, for example, clients would get to a certain position about eight or nine weeks well into the course. And now, they get similar or better results in the fourth week. It doesn't make sense. I know.
How can you take the work of eight weeks and then suddenly get it down to four weeks?
And how can clients get better in a shorter period of time? And this is the kind of redesign that you have to do in your head as a teacher, as a trainer, because if you have all of this extra work that people have to do, you're exhausted, they're exhausted, nobody is thinking.
And when you think, you can recalibrate, change things around, and less is more, really starts to live as an idea that's working, not an idea that you throw around and put on stickers on your desktop. Many years ago, I was like most people. I grew up on the diet of you have to work hard or you won't succeed.
And now I don't agree with hard work.
I agree that specific work needs to be done to get much better results. Hard work seems like such a good feeling at times. I know that clients would say, this course went for three months, and that's 90 days and I wrote 90 articles. But as the teacher, I know the quality of those articles. I know how exhausted people were once they finished the course.
And then after the course, there would be this drop over a cliff. Most of the clients would learn the skill, and they're not write articles. We reduced the workload, and then I gave them a self study.
Now self studies have not worked that well over the years because groups need a leader, they need a teacher, they need someone to mentor them through the process.
But we had to go on holiday.
We went to Thailand, and guess what? The article writing group has continued to write because they're not exhausted. And even in that group design, even in that course design of the follow up, they don't have to write articles the whole time.
It's broken up into write stories this week, do the first paragraph the next week. And so they're assembling many articles, writing great articles, but without the exhaustion.
And yes, there is a minimal dropout because the teacher, the guide, the leader, the whatever you want to call it, is not around. But they're still doing their article writing several months after the course has ended. That exhaustion factor isn't so great.
And this is the crucial part.
And it brings us all the way back to the Henry Ford story. They were dealing more with dropout. You can be very successful. You can innovate in any way you want. But when client staff gets exhausted, then they don't look forward to the experience.
This is one of the secrets, if you want to call it, about Psychotactics. We've never had to advertise much. In fact, we have not advertised at all. We don't do much PR. We barely do any social media except posting photographs. And yet, clients come back repeatedly to do the courses.
And the courses are the high-priced items in our offerings. And the reason why they do it is first because they get a skill. They are guaranteed a skill, not just more information, but also because there is no dread of tackling another course that just saps all your energy.
I don't know how this applies to you.
It probably just applies to you personally. Maybe you work five days a week and then go, let's go on the sixth day, and then a little bit on the seventh.
And it's just draining you slowly maybe, but it's still draining you. So yes, less is more. And this one, it's a practical application that you can use today for yourself and for your clients. And if you've got a company, it's for your staff. This brings us to the end of this podcast.
And what shall we summarize?
Well, five days, that's enough. Take two days off.
Leave a Reply