The goldfish and the red herring: why attention span isn't the problem with your training

June 6, 2024

Is our ability to pay attention less than a goldfish’s? If we believe at least some of the stories in the media, everybody’s attention span is shrinking (like here and here). On the other hand, if you look a little more carefully there is no shortage of counterarguments (like here and here), saying that no, in fact our attention spans are not shrinking, and the research that says that is just studying the wrong thing.

Why is the answer important? When it comes to training your team, it’s important to know if (and for how long) they are going to pay attention to you. Can you sit them down for a whole day, or are you stuck with tiktok level soundbites? If the real problem is a societal one (i.e. if everybody’s attention span is faltering), it might feel like there is nothing we can do to make training more compelling, except make it shorter. But is it true? The answer is surprisingly straightforward.

The problem

“My drivers can’t focus that long.” “All they want is shorter training.” There’s a longstanding perception that drivers don’t like to do training (and want to do as little of it as possible)—and that perception has been around longer than the recent hand-wringing about attention and focus. But let’s stick with that argument for a moment, and consider whether or not attention span is an issue.

If you look at the links to the articles above, you’ll see that there is at least some disagreement over what’s happening with attention, and disagreement even over what it is they are studying. One of the reasons a lot of different researchers give conflicting answers is that they are actually studying different things. One researcher might evaluate how long a subject stares at a newly opened Word document before they look at something else. Another might look at how often students fidget during a lecture. Still another might be looking at something else.

And as for the rest of us non-researchers, our own experiences can give us conflicting evidence. On the one hand, lots of us have had the experience of scrolling mindlessly through short videos on a device, not staying on any one of them for more than a minute (or less). On the other hand, if you’ve ever binge-watched a show on Netflix, sat through a 2 hour movie or read a book to a toddler over and over again, you have evidence that attention spans aren’t a lost cause at all. So what gives?

What’s going on?

So have attention spans gotten shorter? The answer is that our total attention span, across all contexts, can’t be measured in a one-shot deal. Looking at a Word document (and then looking away) just isn’t like playing a board game or doing safety training or watching a movie (fun fact—the average length of Hollywood movies over the last 40 years has actually gone up, not down). So when researchers make big generalizing statements about any one of these, it should be taken with a very large grain of salt. Are there more distractions than there were just 10 or 15 years ago? For sure. And has that made it harder to focus on things we’re not that invested in (like Word docs or random internet videos)? Definitely. But that doesn’t tell us much about what’s going on in the context of safety training.

The truth is that attention is goal-oriented (and this is something that all those different researchers do actually agree on); the amount and depth of attention we pay to something depends on how clear the goal of it is, how desirable that goal is, and how engaging the process of getting there is. If your mind is locked into a movie for a solid 2 hours, it’s probably because the story is engaging, it’s well made and you’re invested in seeing what happens to the hero. But if you’re mindlessly scrolling through short videos of cats, it’s because it’s just not that engaging for more than a few seconds and you’re not really invested in getting something out of it.

Similarly, if a driver is saying that training is taking too long and he wants something shorter, but that night he’s sitting in his cab binge-watching a show for 4 hours straight, attention span isn’t the problem.

If your drivers are looking at their phones while you’re holding an in-class training event, it’s probably not because humanity has suffered a critical failure in attention. It might just be that they’re bored. That’s not an attention-ability thing, it’s a content, context and goal thing. You could tailor your material to be shorter and snappier, to grab whatever attention they are giving you before they look at their phone again, but all you're really doing is admitting that your material isn’t engaging enough and the goal of it isn’t ingrained enough in your people.

The takeaway

So what’s the issue? While I don’t think it’s generally true that drivers want less training (in the same way that professional athletes understand the value of additional coaching and training to keep upping their game). In fact, according to the most recent Best Fleets to Drive For® driver survey, over 90% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that ongoing training is important.

However, there can still be some legitimate barriers to getting driver buy-in, and reasons they might be asking for shorter training. For example:

• Pay
  If you are paying by the mile and then pulling your drivers off the road to do training, it’s pretty easy to see why they would be reticent to do it or, at least, would want that training to be as short as possible. But there are lots of companies out there who have addressed this head-on with either bonuses or straight pay for training.
• Relevance
  If the training is thin, lacks relevance or is condescending, of course drivers will want less of it. Good training doesn’t have to give the experience of an endless stream of tiktok videos, but it should push the learner to use different parts of their brain at various stages of the training. But keeping it fresh doesn’t have to mean keeping it short.
• Clear goals
  Like watching a movie and being invested in seeing what happens at the end, or focusing on a board game because you want to win, the goal of the training should be clear and identifiable. Connecting the action of doing training to a larger, overall, value-laden goal of safety (one that extends across all of the driver’s activities, not just during training), will solve the ‘why am I doing this’ problem. This is particularly critical because, as we’ve seen, attention is goal-directed. Make sure they know what the goal is.

If drivers are asking for shorter training, it’s probably less helpful to write that off as a function of a waning ability to pay attention to things. Instead, think about what else might be going on there—there’s a good chance that the real issue is how locked in your drivers are to your training culture as a goal, and how timely, relevant and contextual the material is (and whether or not they are getting paid). Arguments that reduce training issues to a matter of society-level attention problems are a red herring, and those arguments are probably better left to sleep with the (gold)fishes.