Picture this: An M&E officer attends a three-day workshop on indicator development. The facilitator is excellent. The slides are comprehensive. There's even a certificate at the end. Monday morning, she returns to her desk, opens a blank document, and realises she still can't actually construct a good indicator.
This scenario plays out thousands of times across the development sector. It's not that the workshops are bad or the learners unmotivated. It's that the approach to learning is fundamentally misaligned with how skills are actually built.
The Fluency Illusion
When we follow along with a well-presented lecture, the material feels easy to understand. We nod along, take notes, feel confident. Psychologists call this the fluency illusion—we mistake comprehension for competence.
But understanding a concept and being able to apply it are different cognitive processes. Watching someone calculate a sample size is not the same as calculating one yourself. Reading about logframe design is not the same as constructing a logframe for your specific programme.
Research consistently shows that students who rate lectures as highly effective often perform no better on actual tests than students who felt they struggled through active learning exercises. The struggle is the learning.
The Learning Retention Pattern
While specific percentages should be taken with a grain of salt, the overall pattern from learning research is clear: active methods produce better retention than passive methods.
Learning Retention by Method
Exact percentages vary by study, but the pattern is consistent across research.
"Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers."
— Chickering & Gamson
Traditional Training vs. ImpactMojo's Approach
How Our Labs Work
Every ImpactMojo lab follows a five-step structure designed to build transferable skills, not just temporary understanding:
- Brief Context — 2-3 minutes of reading, not 30 minutes of lecture. Just enough to understand what you're about to do and why.
- Guided Practice — A structured exercise with scaffolding. You're doing the work, but with support.
- Immediate Feedback — Not just right/wrong, but explanations of why certain choices work better.
- Variations — Multiple scenarios with different contexts. Because skill means applying knowledge across situations.
- Real-World Connection — Prompts to apply what you've practiced to your actual work.
Labs You Can Try
The Transfer Problem
Even when people learn something well in a training context, they often struggle to apply it in different situations. This is the transfer problem—and it's why so much professional development fails to change practice.
ImpactMojo addresses transfer in two ways:
Designing for Transfer
- Context matters from the start — Examples drawn from real South Asian development challenges, not abstract scenarios
- Variation in practice — Multiple scenarios across different sectors, scales, and challenges so you learn the underlying principle, not just one application
Just-in-Time vs. Just-in-Case
Traditional training operates on a "just-in-case" model: learn everything now, hope you remember it when you need it. ImpactMojo enables "just-in-time" learning: encounter concepts when you need them to solve an active problem.
When you're designing a survey for your programme tomorrow, the Sample Size Lab isn't abstract—it's immediately relevant. The learning sticks because it's solving a real problem in real time.
Implications for Organisations
If you're responsible for building capacity in your organisation, these principles suggest some uncomfortable truths:
- Evaluate training by transfer, not satisfaction — Happy participants don't mean effective training
- Budget for practice, not just instruction — The workshop is the beginning, not the end
- Create opportunities for application — Mentoring, peer learning, follow-up coaching
- Embrace productive struggle — If learning feels too easy, be skeptical
"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."
— Attributed to Benjamin Franklin
Start Building Real Skills
ImpactMojo's labs are designed for practitioners who need to apply what they learn, not just understand it. Every exercise is built on research about how adults actually develop expertise—and on our experience of what works in the South Asian development context.
Because the sector doesn't need more people who've attended workshops. It needs more people who can actually do the work.