Humour is the best medicine
Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash
Remember that time you sat through training that was so boring you almost fell asleep? No, you probably don’t, because your brain tends not to remember boring experiences. Which is why using humour in learning and development is such an underrated technique.
We all agree that humour can be tricky, risky and terrifying, so not all humour is appropriate in the workplace and not all learning is appropriate for humour. But when appropriate, topic-related instructional humour is used, it can be remarkably effective at improving retention and engagement of learning content.
Neuroscience reveals that humour activates the brain’s dopamine reward system, helping to stimulate pathways to new knowledge, and has a positive effect on memory and information retention.
A meta-analysis of educational humour research identified non-aggressive, relevant, appropriate humour as a helpful learning tool, particularly if it was sandwiched between instruction and repetition. One study showed that using humour was as effective as repetition for retaining information.
Understanding and processing humour is cognitively more challenging so your brain is immediately more engaged with the content.
People remember stories and jokes better than dry content – humour can help people not only remember concepts but also to understand them more easily.
Taking credit for nonsense
We heard of a credit card company whose frontline staff had to memorise 150 different “jargon” words to do their jobs properly. To help remember these words, their learning and development facilitators created a game where team members had to deliver true and false definitions of each term, and could win extra points if they made other team members laugh with their nonsense definitions. Not surprisingly, these trainees retained many more of the jargon words than previous trainees.
There are many theories as to why humour aids learning.
Humour makes us vulnerable and vulnerability leads to trust, while laughter can help create a sense of psychological safety within a group and foster cohesiveness.
Laughter leads to physiological actions like large intakes of breath and flushed cheeks that spark heightened emotions.
Humour is also good for wellbeing, with laughter being shown to lower blood pressure, reduce stress hormones and make you feel good.
Accomplished comedian John Cleese recognised the link between humour and learning as early as the 1970s with his famous sales training videos.
But no matter how fun or interesting, irrelevant humour doesn’t aid learning – the humour needs to be relevant to the content being taught.
How you can use humour in your learning and development
Do use humour that is:
relevant to the material
positive
non-aggressive
Don’t use humour that is:
irrelevant
negative
aggressive
derisive or hostile
culturally inappropriate.
Humour + micro-behaviours = bite-sized learning for the digital age
After three decades honing and refining our approach to developing people and helping organisations deliver change at scale, GRIST knows how to deliver reliable outcomes.
GRIST’s micro-behavioural approach makes adopting new behaviours easier. Distilling change down to its essence by defining a critical few micro-behaviours focuses energy and produces outstanding results.
GRIST realised that with attention spans shrinking and multi-tasking (multi-screening!) on the rise, we could harness humour and micro-behaviours to deliver essential knowledge in an economical way. Humour to aid retention and engagement, plus an actionable micro-behavioural framework to teach one skill at a time.
The GIST by GRIST. Learning with a twist.
Introducing… Bite-size videos that provide the very essence – the GIST – of what you need to know delivered using easy, proven behavioural change methodologies – by GRIST.
And we have partnered with Australia’s funniest people – the twist – to ensure learning lands in a way that makes it stick!
Check out The GIST’s first bite-sized video and contact us to learn more.
