In the Pixar movie Inside Out, memories are depicted as small, colorful orbs which are stored in our brains for as long as they remain clear and bright. If they start to fade, they’ll get tossed into the Dump – a deep, dark pit, where they’ll eventually disintegrate into dust and be forgotten forever.  

Without going into the science of how long- and short-term memory works, it helps to picture our memory as a physical place. With a constant flow of new data and only a finite amount of room, our unconscious is working away in the background, figuring out what we need to hang onto and what we can throw out.  

In an era of information overload, it’s challenging for new memories to hold on to a place long-term. And with the daily urgencies of overflowing inboxes and family obligations, there isn’t much space for theoretical models, however useful they may be for our personal and professional development. Like the orbs in Inside Out, these kinds of memories will simply roll away unless we can find a way to keep them in place – to make them stick.  

This is what we call ‘sticky learning’. It’s a term we use a lot at Hult Ashridge Executive Education, because when it comes to designing leadership and organizational development solutions, the more memorable the learning, the greater the impact it will have in an organization.  

So, how do you get learning to stick? Talking at people doesn’t work – no matter how fascinating the topic is, it will get pushed aside to deal with the next email or request. 

Rachel Sceats, Head of Experiential Learning at Hult Ashridge, has been in the field for over 20 years. “I often ask groups what they remember from their previous module,” she says, “And they’ll often pick out the experiential exercises that they did, and relate those exercises to their experience. That for me is sticky learning: they have been able to think about the ‘so what?’ after doing something, and therefore it becomes really memorable, and helps them think about how they apply this when they’re back at work. It really is by the action of doing that it sticks in your mind.”  

In her doctoral work, Trudi West – Professor of Practice in Leadership and Psychology at Hult International Business School – describes sticky learning as “the moment when something finds its home in your body, and you go, ‘Oh, I understand. I get it.’ It’s as if it resonates through your body. Without going into complete fight or flight, your body is saying, ‘This is unusual territory’, and you can feel that uncertainty.”  

And she’s talking quite literally here. Whether it’s butterflies in the stomach or clammy palms, “that physicality is telling you something that’s worth paying attention to.” In our use of heart rate variance monitors, we can actually see the moments when participants experience these ‘alerts’ in the data captured on the chart. “And we know from research that whatever was creating the response is usually the thing they take forwards.”  

It doesn’t take much for experiential learning to come back to the surface. The learning creates a shortcut, explains West, connecting whatever you’re experiencing now to the memory of your previous experience, and crucially, your understanding of it – allowing you to draw on and apply what you already know. “You might forget it, but you can’t unknow it,” she says.  

So, after the learning moment has passed and the busyness of daily life takes center stage once again, the realizations you make through experiential learning will be waiting somewhere in the wings, ready to be called upon.