If you wander around a mineral-rich patch of red dirt in the Australian outback, and kick the dust, you can pick up a sapphire, an opal or a nugget of gold. Free of charge. No drilling licence, no billion-dollar processing plant. Just a trained eye and a willingness to look.
The Aussies call this fossicking.
Here’s the interesting thing. Two people can walk the same patch of ground. One goes home with a pocketful of gems. The other goes home with sunburn and dusty boots.
The same is true of every meeting you sat through last week.
Every board pack, every quarterly review, every awkward one-to-one and every rambling town hall is a patch of mineral-rich dirt. There’s value lying in the dust. The question is not whether it’s there. The question is whether you can see it, pick it up and turn it into something useful before you rush to your next meeting.
Most people are, frankly, terrible fossickers.
Seven Times? Really?
There’s an old saying, beloved of marketers since the Hollywood studios of the 1930s, that people need to hear a message seven times before it sinks in. The “Rule of Seven” has about as much rigorous evidence behind it as a horoscope. But the instinct behind it is sound, and the actual science is, if anything, worse news.
In 1885 a German psychologist spent years memorising nonsense syllables and testing himself on how fast he forgot them. His famous forgetting curve showed that we lose a large chunk of new material within the first hour, and most of it within a day or two, unless we do something with it. When this research was replicated in 2015, the curve held up almost perfectly, 130 years later.
Translate that into your diary. On Tuesday you leave a two-hour strategy offsite buzzing with insights. By Thursday you remember the lunch, the person who talked too much, and possibly one slide.
If a mining company extracted so little value, it would be bankrupt by Friday.
Nickel (and Dimes) Can Make You Rich
Consider nickel, or more specifically nickel mining. In laterite ore, nickel typically makes up only about 1–2% of the rock in which it sits. Roughly 98% of what comes out of the ground is just rock. And yet mining companies can make a healthy profit extracting the 2%. In fact, I’ve been on some sites where mining companies were turning a profit when only 0.3% of the rock was nickel.
The process of extracting nickel to make a dime (which is only partly made of nickel) is brutal. First the rock is crushed and ground to powder, a step so energy-hungry that it’s estimated to consume around 3% of the world’s electricity. Then, in a process called high pressure acid leaching, the slurry is fed into autoclaves and cooked in sulphuric acid at around 250°C and roughly 40 times atmospheric pressure. Only then can the nickel be extracted from the rock and used to make dimes, stainless steel, car batteries and much else besides.
Compare the efficiency of nickel extraction with a human’s ability to extract value from a conversation. In a meeting we nod, agree with someone’s point about changing a supply chain process; we may even use software to record the conversation, and then we never think about it again. We just go to our next meeting.
No crushing. No heat. No pressure. No energy spent in reflection. No wonder the intellectual yield is so poor.
But stick with the metaphor for a moment, because it gets interesting. Crushing is reductionism: breaking the whole into parts so you can analyse them. Leaders are brilliant at this. It’s also what business schools, and the consulting industry, have been doing for years. Most leaders have a world-class crusher in their offices.
What they rarely have is the autoclave. The heat and pressure stage. Someone who can hold the material under investigation with intense heat, pressure and scrutiny until it transforms. Crushing alone gives you a very neat pile of gravel, and a very neat pile of bullet points. It doesn’t give you nickel.
This is Not About Learning Style
Many people think the extraction process has something to do with learning styles. Their inability to extract value from a conversation is, they claim, because they’re “a visual learner” and that’s why so few insights were gathered or stuck. Twenty nuggets were handed out, but most people left the meeting with a pile of dust.
In 2008 researchers showed that extraction has nothing to do with learning styles. The evidence for the impact of learning styles was reviewed, and the researchers found virtually no support for the idea that matching teaching to a person’s preferred style improves learning. It’s one of the most popular myths in education. It persists in corporate L&D like a stubborn weed, and it’s completely wrong.
What does work is far more interesting, and it looks a lot like the autoclave.
We now know that what we remember depends on the depth of our processing. Shallow processing, simply noticing what something looks or sounds like, fades fast. Deep processing, wrestling with meaning and connecting it to what you already know, sticks.
A related idea was later named desirable difficulties: learning that feels harder in the moment produces far more durable results. It’s also been shown that actively retrieving information beats re-reading it, often by a wide margin. This is called the testing effect. In addition, a major 2013 review of learning techniques concluded that the strategies most people rely on, namely highlighting and re-reading, are among the least effective approaches. Testing your knowledge and revisiting it over time were way more effective.
In other words, the brain extracts value under heat and pressure. Comfort is the enemy of yield.
Your Maturity Level Determines Your Extraction Ability
There’s one more reason the yield varies so wildly from person to person, and it’s the one that matters the most.
A mature fossicker doesn’t just look harder; they see differently. This isn’t a matter of experience; it’s a matter of sophistication, your ability to look. To an untrained, unsophisticated eye, a raw opal looks like a dull pebble. To someone who knows what they’re looking for, it practically glows.
As educational psychologist David Ausubel put it: the single most important factor influencing fossicking or a learning is what the learner already knows. This was beautifully illustrated in a classic 1972 experiment, researchers read people a short paragraph of instructions without context. Without knowing what the instructions were about people remembered very little. But when people were told the instructions were about washing clothes, every sentence suddenly made sense, and they remembered roughly twice as much. Crucially, being told the context after reading the instruction didn’t help at all. The context had to be in place before the information arrived.
The fact that you extract more value if you are already knowledgeable was also demonstrated with chess masters. They could look at a board for five seconds and recreate the positions of the pieces almost perfectly, while novices managed to only remember a handful of pieces. Masters weren’t better at memory. They saw meaningful patterns where novices saw scattered pieces of wood.
The impact of maturity plays out massively in the boardroom. Most leaders in the C-suite operate at what’s called the Expert or Achiever level of maturity.
Experts believe there is always a “right” answer; Achievers believe there are “optimal” answers. Consequently, once Experts find a nugget they believe is “right”, they may stop looking. Achievers may keep looking and pick up two or three more nuggets, consider them all and drop everything but the best. But if a leader matures beyond these levels, they may keep fossicking, because they recognise that there may be unlimited riches to mine. Leaders operating at these various levels of maturity are all in the same conversation, but the more mature leader has ten times the yield.
This means leaders who already understand more can extract more from every new encounter, so the gap widens over time. Maturity compounds.
How to Become a World Class Fossicker
You can’t install a 250°C autoclave in your head, but you can become a world-class fossicker, and here’s how:
1. Prospect before you dig. Before any meeting, ask yourself one question: what would make this hour genuinely valuable to me? A fossicker who knows they’re looking for sapphires finds more sapphires, so prepare before you start.
2. Listen for the 2%. Most of any conversation is “rock”, i.e., just noise with little added value. The value is usually found in the moment of surprise, discomfort or disagreement. When you feel a flicker of irritation, lean in. That’s often where the ore is.
3. Crush, but don’t stop there. Break the conversation into its parts, then put it back under pressure. Ask: what does this mean for me, my team and the wider system? What would I have to believe for this to be true?
4. Think in ink and reprocess. Write down the salient points during the meeting. The act of writing things down helps you process the information. Then, after the meeting, reprocess the information by reflecting on the key insights and how they relate to your existing understanding.
5. See one, do one, teach one. I picked up this rule when training as a doctor. Force yourself to teach someone else what you’ve just learnt within 48 hours and you will extract way more value.
6. Develop your perception. Develop your ability to evaluate what you are perceiving, not just through seeing and hearing but through all 33 of your senses. Every new level of development increases the quality of every conversation you have, helping you fossick more and more.
What’s Your Grade – Your Level of Extraction?
Mining companies obsess over one number: the grade of the ore and how much they can actually recover. If there’s 3% nickel, they want all of it. If there’s 0.3%, they still want all of it. If recovery drops by a few percentage points, the board wants to know why.
Humans seem quite happy to extract one idea and leave dozens of potentially bigger or better ideas behind.
Studies of senior managers found they spend nearly 80% of their time in conversation, and most never define what their personal extraction rate is.
So, here’s my challenge for the week ahead.
After every meeting, before you return to your inbox, ask yourself one question:
How many nuggets did I extract, and how many did I miss?