A schema is a way to organize a pattern or thought using relationships to what is already known. For instance, make a relationship between what is known by your audience and what you seek to convey to them. This eliminates the need to explain much of the detail since your audience brings a body of knowledge with them.
For example, if you have never seen a mountain lion, I might simply say that it is a very large cat without needing to describe that it has four legs, short ears, a long tail, etc. By starting with something they know, the audience can get a mental picture of a mountain lion without ever seeing one. This allows me to make my message very compact.
In business, making your message compact is the key to making it memorable. For example, read the following sequence of 15 letters and try to remember as many as you can.
F I R I M R I U B I S B N A O
Now let’s rearrange the letters and try again.
FBI IRS IBM NRA IOU
Now, how many can you remember? My guess is that you can now remember all the letters.
The difference is we organized the letters into groups of three letters that triggered an identifiable idea. For example, we took F B I, which is actually three letters, but using our schema we linked it to one idea of men in jackets with FBI in big yellow letters.
Often mnemonics are used to represent a single idea that links to many other ideas. In fact, the unit FBI not only help us to remember the three letters but also opens up connections to a huge basket of other memories associated with the FBI.
How can you use a schema to make your message more compact, and therefore, more memorable?
