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As someone who's been into a CFAR workshop, I think their problem is the opposite, actually. The article's description makes it sound complicated, but the fact is that a lot of the techniques are pretty simple when it comes down to it. And that's the problem: they're so simple that it's hard to get people to realize how useful they are. Most people will hear a description, shrug, go "makes sense I guess", and then forget all about it. Take TAPs (Trigger-Action Plans) that are mentioned in the article. They're basically pretty much what it sounds like: plans of the form "when [trigger], then [action]". "When I see stairs, I'll take them (rather than using the elevator)". Not something that'd sound very revolutionary. But if you dig into the psychological literature, when people are instructed to set goals and use TAPs (the psych literature calls them "implementation intentions") to plan out how exactly they'll achieve those goals, people get better success rates than people who don't. (if you want a reference, google e.g. [1]) There's a bunch stuff about what makes for a good TAP and how you should use them to get the best results, but even if you include all of that, it's still not very complicated. The guidelines are stuff like "make your trigger a concrete specific thing such as 'when I see the stairs', not vague ones such as 'before dinner'". Not rocket surgery. So here we have a simple, straightforward technique that has research support behind it - and getting people to use it is hard. It just doesn't sound exciting enough, or obviously useful enough. Heck, I too often just forget that I could use TAPs for something. Most of their techniques are kinda like this. Simple, useful, and not terribly exciting by themselves. So - I don't know if this is their explicit motivation for having a three-day workshop, but I think that this is a big part of the reason why the format works - instead of trying to make the individual techniques exciting, they instead throw everything and the kitchen sink at you within a short time period. Rather than relying on any single one of them making you go "wow", they rely on the sheer amount of them to make you go "wow" - and then, hopefully, actually adopt at least some of them. As well as to internalize the mode of thought that lets you come up with your own. It seems to work okay. [1] Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta‐analysis of effects and processes. Advances in experimental social psychology, 38, 69-119. |