The 90% Forgetting Problem No One Talks About (feat. Mamie Kanfer Stewart)

Mamie Kanfer Stewart figured this out the hard way. As the founder of Meeteor and host of the Modern Manager podcast, she spent years running workshops that left people energized and changed almost nothing. So she walked away from that model, went deep on adult learning science and behavior design, and built something different: the micro-workshop approach, a format designed for distributed, time-strapped teams that can’t afford to disappear for a day, and can’t afford to keep training that doesn’t move the needle.

In this episode, Matt Poepsel sits down with Mamie Kanfer Stewart, founder of Meeteor and author of Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging, and Enjoyable Meetings, to challenge the assumptions most organizations hold about how people learn at work. They dig into why knowledge and behavior change are not the same thing, why the format of training, not the content, is what usually fails, and how short, recorded, action-anchored sessions can do what three-hour offsites can’t.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The Knowledge-Skill-Behavior Gap: Having information is step one. Knowing how to use it is step two. Actually doing it under pressure is where most training falls completely apart.
• Why the Format Is the Problem: Organizations keep blaming the facilitator or the topic when the real issue is a delivery model that was never designed to produce lasting change.
• The APPLY Framework: Mamie’s learning design approach anchors every session to real work, builds in practice time, draws on group experience, and sends everyone out with one shared next action, not a personalized list no one follows.
• Living Assets Over One-Time Events: When sessions are short and recorded, they stop being moments and start being infrastructure, for catch-up, for reinforcement, and for onboarding every new hire who comes after.

Highlights:
(00:00) Meet Mamie Kanfer Stewart
(01:30) The gap between saying you value learning and actually doing it
(04:50) The three components of learning, and where training breaks down
(10:42) Why we lose 90% of what we learn within two weeks
(11:57) What led Mamie to walk away from the traditional workshop model
(13:07) Diving into adult learning science and BJ Fogg’s behavior design
(17:19) The APPLY framework, broken down
(22:58) Training that lives beyond the event
(27:00) What AI changes, and what it can’t replace, in team learning

Resources:
Follow Mamie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mamiekanferstewart/
Visit Mamie’s website: mamieks.com
Listen to the Modern Manager podcast: themodernmanager.com

Follow Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattpoepsel/
Subscribe to The Predictive Index on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ThePredictiveIndex

Created in partnership with Share Your Genius: shareyourgenius.com