Malcolm knew everything

Training Is Behaviour Change, Not Attendance

I once worked with a man I'll call Malcolm. Malcolm was, by his own self assessment, an expert at everything.

Whatever came up in the office, Malcolm knew it. Someone mentioned tennis, and Malcolm knew precisely what was wrong with your backhand. Someone described a bumpy flight, and Malcolm knew how the landing ought to have been handled. Someone raised a discussion on world poverty, and Malcolm – you guessed it – knew exactly how to sort that out too. He was a genuinely remarkable resource, provided you never actually needed anything done.

Because here's the tiny, inconvenient, detail underneath all the expertise: Malcolm had never done any of it. Never played a game of tennis in his life. Never flown or landed a plane. Had contributed precisely nothing to world poverty either. He knew a great deal about a great many things and could do almost none of them – which is a funny quirk in an interesting colleague, and a surprisingly expensive one when it becomes an entire organisation's approach to learning.

Because every year, organisations spend serious money sending people on courses designed, when you look closely, to make them a little more like Malcolm. People go. They attend. They increase the HR attendance numbers. They come back knowing more – and then carry on doing exactly what they did before. The course was well designed, the teacher was good, the content was relevant, the attendance excellent. And nothing changed. This isn't the unusual outcome; it's the ordinary one, and it stays ordinary for as long as we keep mistaking attendance for learning, and information for ability.

It helps to separate two things. Awareness is real and worth having – knowing a new rule exists, or that a new tool is on its way, or a way of working could be possible genuinely helps. But awareness is not training. Training earns the name only when behaviour actually shifts – when people start working differently, more capably, more confidently, when the way the thing gets done genuinely changes. If nobody's behaviour moved, you didn't build competence and ability; you consumed content, and bought a comforting sense of "training people".

A great deal of what gets called development is really information transfer in a learning portal or a nice room: people leave knowing more, and probably had some fun, and return doing the same.

And the reason it keeps happening is mostly about where we've decided learning lives. We've put it in a catalogue – a platform, a course list, a completion rate to track – which feels productive and probably isn't, because learning was never in the catalogue. It lives in the work, right next to the person doing it.

The most useful thing anyone ever learns tends to arrive not in a classroom but in the middle of a real problem, with someone more experienced close enough to help. Which means the interesting question isn't "what courses should we run this year?" It's the smaller, remarkably more optimistic one: what do people actually need to be able to do differently next month – and what would help that happen? When we ask that question, most of what helps people learn kind of shines through on its own, and almost none of it looks like just a course. Real workplace learning is pulled by a genuine need rather than pushed by a policy and a breadth of resources in the catalogue. When the training is attached to a problem someone's wrestling with right now, relevance and engagement grow too.

It's personal rather than generic – shaped by what this particular person is good at, where they're stuck, and what they'll be asked to do next – and it blends real work, coaching, and some targeted information rather than a list of modules to tick off. It pairs knowing with doing, in that order: a course can hand you the language and the frameworks and the information, but capability only ever shows up in the practice, when the knowledge meets something real. And let's be honest, those first few attempts are hardly going to be perfect.

The gains from any bit of learning evaporate within weeks unless someone stays close enough to notice the old habits and behaviours creeping back and gently nudge them the other way. Training isn't about completion of a course, it's in the unglamorous follow-through afterwards.

Which is also why the usual measure is worse than it first seems. Attendance is wonderfully easy to count, stick on a report and be handed a round of applause for – and tells you almost nothing; ability is a nuisance to measure but it's the important measure of all of it. The question after any money spent on learning is not "how many people completed it?" It's "what's actually different about how they work now?". If the honest answer is "nothing," then whatever you ran, it wasn't training. It was a fun session with a certificate at the end. And it was cost too.

What actually works is far less of an event and more a well spotted insight. It's someone noticing a real gap, building something specific for it, running it close to the actual work, coaching the person through the first few clumsy attempts, and staying with it until the new way of doing things has become the normal behaviour. It takes longer than a two-day course. It likely costs a great deal less in the long run too.

The people and places that genuinely get better over time are almost never the ones with the finest and broadest training catalogue or the highest attendance ratings. They're the ones who treat getting better as part of the daily work rather than a thing you leave the work to do. They also understand that real learning isn't done for the metrics or the praise. It's the slow, deliberate business of helping someone become more competent and able, and staying close enough to know when they actually have.

So, when it comes to landing a plane. Would we rather have a person who's learned the information, done the courses and put in insane levels of practice and flight time under expert supervision? Or Malcolm? I know which one I'd choose.