Conundrum

Transactive memory is a psychological hypothesis first proposed by Daniel Wegner in 1985 as a response to earlier theories of "group mind" such as groupthink. A transactive memory system is a system through which groups collectively encode, store, and retrieve knowledge.

The organization I work for is devoted to finding better ways to train. This is a wonderful work environment because we question everything without question. This includes the content within our delivery systems. As I write, we are looking to re-vamp our LMS, social business software, and partner portal.

What impact does this shifting and moving of information have on our audience? As our business changes and grows we create print, video, web based trainings, and instructor led seminars. Sometimes we look at the number of views per training piece and wonder why there are so few views relative to our audience.

One guess, of many, is that the information is a moving target or we put the information in a place where “we” think it should go. Basically, we may be playing hide and seek with our audience. If that is the case then how is our audience still getting the facts correct?

Having done some time in the field I have a guess – they are using their account managers and representatives find the answers for them. I can tell you that when I was an Area Sales Manager I spent 70% of my time explaining and relaying information to my accounts. Information that was available in 3 hyperlinks or less.

The basic idea behind transactive memory is that within a groupthink system, we no longer choose to retain information because the answer is a mouse click or an email response away.

Our audience isn’t getting their information through osmosis; they are just leaning on the human barrier between them and on-demand information. I believe we call this a conundrum. You could cut off the human Google engine but transactive memory tells us this is the equivalent of losing your mind – almost literally.

The answer may lie in training in the New World Order. We have become so dependent on letting our knowledge live in the clouds that we have to train people on how to use the system that stores the information – so they don’t have to. This is a little scary to be completely honest.