A workplace that cannot absorb a change should not have bought one

If there is no occasion to use a new skill, the failure was in the purchase, not in the learner.

Some skills are taught into a vacuum. The practice requires a situation that arises twice a year, or a tool that has not been approved, or a decision that sits two levels up. The person leaves capable and waits. By the time the occasion arrives the detail has gone, and what remains is a general awareness that there was a better way of doing this, which is not the same thing and cannot be executed. This outcome is often described as decay, as though the person had leaked the skill. More accurately, they were never given the chance to use it.

The reasonable conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone who sells or arranges training. An organisation that cannot provide an occasion for the new practice within a short window should not commission the training at that time. Deferring it is not a failure of ambition; it is a recognition that capability with no outlet has a short life and that the money will buy more later, when the tool has been approved, the workload has room, or the decision has been delegated. Training bought too early is money spent on a capability the organisation has arranged to prevent.

This is where the whole subject converges. Transfer is not principally a property of a session, a facilitator or a design, although all three matter. It is a property of the arrangement between a person, a workplace and a moment. The training function can improve its part considerably and should. But the more consequential decisions, who comes, what they return to, whether anyone asks, and whether there is anything to use it on, are made elsewhere, usually casually, and usually by people who have never been told they were making them.