Training sent to fix a problem that is not individual

A large share of requests arrive as skills problems and turn out, on inspection, to be problems of process, staffing or design.

Something goes wrong. An error recurs, a complaint is upheld, a near miss is recorded. A response is required and training is the response most readily available, because it is procurable, visible and does not require anybody senior to change a decision they made earlier. So a session is commissioned to address behaviour that is in fact produced by a form with an ambiguous field, a shift pattern that guarantees fatigue at the point of highest risk, or a target that quietly rewards the shortcut everyone takes. The people are then trained to behave in a way the system penalises.

Predictably, nothing changes, and the failure is attributed to the training or to the people. This is the most expensive pattern in the field and also the most persistent, because each iteration produces evidence that is misread. The correct reading of a well delivered session that produced no change is often that the diagnosis was wrong, not that the delivery was. Very little in the standard arrangement encourages that reading, since the party best placed to make it is the one who was paid to deliver.

The remedy is a conversation that happens before the commissioning, in which somebody asks whether a capable, willing person, fully informed, would currently be able to do the desired thing in that workplace. If the answer is no, training is not the intervention, and running it anyway will consume budget and goodwill while teaching everyone involved that this sort of exercise does not lead anywhere. Being able to say that, and being willing to lose the work by saying it, is one of the sharper tests of integrity in the training trade.