Practice & Time

How many times have you left some form of training experience having made a commitment to change an important aspect of your work or life?

Yet as soon as you are outside the training ‘bubble’ you seem to actively forget almost everything your have learnt. Invariably, after two or three days your firm personal commitment to change has become an unfulfilled distant memory.

This type of scenario plays out in multiple settings. We see similar dynamics following New Year resolutions, our promises to a doctor or therapist or the lengthy to-do list after a ‘highly productive’ off-site. In hindsight, what often feel like sensible plans in the moment fall victim to the engrained momentum of our day-to-day reality. This is a shocking waste of time, effort and money. But there is also a sizeable personal cost. The eventual drip-drip of cumulative disappointment can eat away at our confidence and undermine our capacity, and capability to change.

Despite our best intentions we tend not to do what we say we will do. We make grand commitments to change…but intentionality seems to evaporate the moment it encounters the action, traction and distraction of everyday life.

In the nineteenth century Hermann Ebbinghaus nicely captured this phenomena with his ‘forgetting curves’. One hundred and twenty years later, after volumes of academic research on ‘transfer’, we are still no closer to cracking the issue.

Those of us who work in the field know only too well the complexity of this problem. We can finely tune our pedagogy during teaching, learning or training but more often than not something seems to get in the way afterwards. Arguably recent developments in cognitive neuroscience only made the situation worst. A naïve focus by many on brain plasticity misses the fact that the brain is also elastic and tends to revert when back in familiar and comfortable contexts. Unless we practise new behaviours over time we end up doing what we have we have always done.

Temporal World addresses the limitations of intentionality. We highlight the power of temporal context in getting things done.

Our approach involves a post formal-learning intervention that enables disciplined practice and tangible activity. Focusing on linear and non-linear temporal dynamics, this approach unpacks the personal world of the learner making that world visible and measurable. In the process, it exposes the hidden temporal traps that sabotage learning and undermine the commitment to action.

Temporal World is a private limited company based in London and Dublin. Our broad goal is to transform the way we think about learning, doing and time – a goal supported by a proprietary research and application framework. Building on this framework, the company is currently testing its approach alongside a leading European multinational, with the first phased roll-out expected in Q4 2017. As we grow, we are eager to develop what we do with a diverse, multi-disciplinary workforce that can flourish through alternative forms of working and engagement.