Blank Slate rapidly closes knowledge gaps across workforces

Blank Slate
3 min readMay 31, 2023

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In every organization, there are people who really know their stuff and people who need a little refresher. That’s perfectly normal. Unfortunately, because of the shortcomings of existing tools, most organizations don’t have data-driven insights into their workforce knowledge levels or a system for addressing deficiencies.

Blank Slate can help. Our custom analytics identify knowledge gaps across teams in real-time while our app brings entire workforces up to speed on their training and protocols. High performers stay high, while those who need a refresher are brought up to speed quickly and in a way that is entirely bespoke to how their brain works.

Data from one of our new clients demonstrates this well.

Earlier this year, 70 security guards who follow strict protocols to keep their facility secure started using Blank Slate for a few minutes each week to stay razor sharp on their work and maximize cognitive performance. In the beginning, their levels of knowledge proficiency varied a lot, as would be expected. We started tracking how quickly Blank Slate could improve their knowledge levels, especially those who started off low and needed some extra support.

To do this, we grouped employees as “high knowledge” or “low knowledge,” based on whether they performed higher or lower than 76% (their median score) the first time they used Blank Slate. This resulted in 35 employees categorized as “high” and 35 categorized as “low” knowledge. We did this anonymously and only for the purpose of our internal analyses; any information about specific employees was not shared with our client.

Check out the learning curves below to see how quickly these employees progressed.‍

Average time required per employee: 3 minutes 11 seconds per week. These lines would converge even faster with a few more minutes of app usage per week, but 3 minutes delivers exceptional results as seen here.

On Day 1, Blank Slate detected a huge knowledge discrepancy in our client’s workforce. The 35 employees with high knowledge levels averaged 88.2% accuracy, whereas the 35 with low knowledge averaged 66.7%. That’s a 21.5 point difference.

With differences like these, management can’t optimally respond with one-size-fits-all training solutions because each member of their workforce has unique needs.

Moreover, from this and other deployments, Blank Slate knows that these kinds of knowledge gaps cause serious problems with performance. When half of a team can’t recall proper procedures to follow, mistakes and compliance issues often follow. Or in this case, a facility might not be as secure as it needs to be. That’s a huge problem.

By Day 40 this significant performance gap already began to close. After using the app for less than four minutes per week on average, there was only an 8 point difference between employees who started off with high versus low knowledge levels.

By Day 110, the gap closed to only a 6 point difference. This was the day we pulled these data for this blog post, and we expect based on other similar deployments that the gap will continue to close from here.

And now for the best part: Unlike other programs, Blank Slate ensures that knowledge levels always stay high, leading to maximized cognitive performance. Whereas other programs engage with users once or twice a year, Blank Slate engages users for just a few minutes every single week. That way, key knowledge stays front-of-mind for all employees, all the time.

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Amy Smith, PhD

Chief Science Officer, Blank Slate

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Want these results at your organization? Get in touch!

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Blank Slate

Blank Slate is a deeptech cognitive science firm dedicated to pushing the limits of the human brain.