Whether the new way is actually possible where they work

A great deal of what looks like resistance is simply a practice that cannot be performed in the environment people return to.

Training routinely teaches a method that assumes conditions the workplace does not supply. It assumes a record that the current system has no field for, a step that the shift pattern leaves no time for, a conversation that the physical layout makes impossible, or a decision the person is not authorised to make. When the method is demonstrated in a session these constraints are absent, so nobody notices. When the person tries to use it on the job they hit the constraint in the first five minutes, conclude reasonably that it does not apply here, and stop.

From the outside this reads as poor uptake, and it is frequently reported as an attitude problem. It is not. It is a design failure that occurred before the session, when nobody checked whether the intended practice fits the actual setting. The check is not difficult. It involves asking a few people who do the work to walk through the new method in their own context out loud, and listening for the point at which they say that would not work here. That sentence is the most valuable thing anybody says in the whole process, and it is usually treated as an objection to be overcome rather than information to be acted on.

Where the constraint is real and cannot be moved, the responsible conclusion is that the training should be changed or not run. Teaching a method that cannot be executed produces frustration, quiet contempt for the training function, and a workforce that has learned mainly that what happens in sessions is not connected to what happens at work. That lesson transfers extremely well, which is the sour joke at the centre of the subject.