Conclusion first
Το συμπέρασμα πρώτο
Putting the one sentence you want decided at the front, before any background, so the room has somewhere to put everything that follows. Work on cognitive load explains why the order matters: a listener holds what you are saying in a small working space, and background with no conclusion attached to it fills that space with material they cannot use yet.
How to spot it
Read your first sentence back and ask what the room could vote on if you stopped there.
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Paas, F., Renkl, A., & Sweller, J. (2003). Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design — doi:10.1207/S15326985EP3801_1
The authors present the latest developments in Cognitive Load Theory. They argue that effective instruction must reduce extraneous cognitive load and facilitate the processing of new information by working memory.
Practised in
The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.
Ten Minutes to the Decision
Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Paas, F., Renkl, A., & Sweller, J. (2003). Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design — doi:10.1207/S15326985EP3801_1