The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

Bungay Stanier believes helping people learn is a difficult task, as they do not always learn when taught. He claims true learning takes place when a person must use recall. The question “What was most useful to you?” stimulates this recall and helps employees further embed their manager’s lessons. Recall is an example of double loop learning (a term coined by academic Chris Argyris) in which “the first loop is trying to fix a problem, [and] the second loop is creating a learning moment about the issue at hand” (188). Bungay Stanier claims most people tend to forget everything as soon as they leave a corporate meeting. Considering this, the manager’s job is to create spaces and opportunities for real learning and memory retention. Bungay Stanier discusses a model of long-term memory retention created by researcher Josh Davis, called AGES: Attention, Generation, Emotion and Spacing (188). This model aligns with the question “What was most useful to you?”—embedding information in a person’s memory more effectively than simply giving advice.

“What was most useful to you?” also preempts the forgetting process, an idea that Bungay Stanier borrows from the book, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (2014) written by eminent psychologists Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel.