The Carat Experiment: 1997
Picture this: Carat, Europe's biggest independent media buyer. A conference room. Forty people. Some of the top brass taking lessons with us. Even the legal director showed up—not for the training audit, but because he liked our style.
Marianne and I were about to run an experiment live and they would be the unsuspecting subjects.
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The Problem We Started With
Marianne and I had noticed something frustrating during our lessons. Students would ace the lesson. They'd nail the concepts, remember the stories, grasp the bigger picture. But the vocabulary? The specific words we'd drilled them on? Gone.
We asked around with our Speechmark teaching team, and one of the ideas that came back was that old standard: if you see or hear something seven times, you'll remember it.
It was a hunch, a hunch we thought we could easily test. And we had the perfect set up: a boardroom full of stakeholders.
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The Slide
We prepared a presentation slide deck on the training programme for the year ahead—all business, very official. Audit results. Pedagogy. Schedule. The works.
And then I created a single slide.
Just a cartoon. A surprised character. On one side: soudainement. On the other: out of the blue.
Harmless. Confusing. Perfect.
I slipped that slide in seven times during the presentation in between the . Not hidden—just... there. Between the serious bits. Some puzzled looks from the room. I remember one or two smiles. But mostly: What's that about?
At the end, I wrapped up professionally. "Thank you all for your time. I look forward to seeing you in training."
And then, just as people started to move, I asked casually:
"Oh, by the way—how do you say soudainement in English?"
What happened next was fun.
Twelve people—nearly a third of the room—blurted out: "Out of the blue!"
The room erupted with laughter, the legal director was grinning and the top brass giggled. It was the moment everyone stopped thinking about training and started feeling what happens when learning works without you realizing it's happening.
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The Birth of Turnover (Later: LEXICA)
That moment changed things for Marianne.
She was watching people enjoy remembering. She was watching repetition stop being drudgery and become play. And she thought: How do we make this repeatable? How do we make repetition fun?
She designed a game. We called it Turnover—a board game based on Reversi, where vocabulary became the strategy. You'd play. You'd see the words again and again. You'd win. You'd laugh. And then you'd know the vocabulary.
We even patented the idea. We wanted to manufacture it but this was 1998. Estimates to produce a board game in France? Astronomical. We got as far as cutting pieces and drawing boards. It worked beautifully with students—they didn't want to stop playing. But the business case didn't exist.
So Turnover went into a drawer. And stayed there for nearly 30 years.
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The Long Wait
Over the next three decades, I moved on. Consulting. Innovation. Data management. Building apps for trainers, dashboards for learning, tools for change.
Then, in 2022, Marianne died. Cancer. She never saw the game come back.
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2026: Out of the Blue Again
This year, I asked my colleague Jijun (Victor) if he'd be interested in resurrecting Marianne's game—not as a board, but as an app. He said yes.
LEXICA was born.
Same principle. Same fun. Same repetition magic. It's here, free to play, so go on and knock yourselves out and learn some English, French, Spanish, German vocabulary.
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Because sometimes the best pedagogical idea is the simplest one: play a game, laugh, repeat the words and watch them stick.
Just don't tell them you're teaching them anything.
Marianne would have loved it.
30 septembre 2026