Why training doesn't stick

The short answer: most training doesn't stick because people go back to a system that pulls them back to their old behaviour, and because each person has hidden, often sensible reasons for staying the same. Training usually addresses neither. It improves what people know, then sends them back to the same pressures and the same inner commitments that produced the old behaviour in the first place.

I've designed learning for over 30 years: outcomes-based curricula, leadership development for a 20,000-person industrial group, and culture-change programmes in a large financial institution. This is the pattern I've seen most often, and what I've learned to design for.

The usual explanations, and why they're incomplete

When training doesn't stick, the usual diagnosis is one of these:

• People forget. True, and spaced practice helps. But people often remember the training perfectly well and still don't use it.
• There wasn't enough practice. True, and more practice helps. But skills practised in a workshop often vanish under real pressure.
• Managers don't support it. Usually true, and very important. But why don't they? Usually because the same system is pulling on them too.

Each of these explanations is real, and each is about the training event. The deeper causes sit outside the event, in two places.

Outside the person: the system pulls people back

Every organisation is a system that keeps itself the way it is. Its structures, targets, reporting lines, informal rules and shared anxieties all reward the current way of working. That's what makes it stable.

When someone comes back from a course wanting to work differently, the system responds the way systems do: it pulls them back. A manager asks for things the old way. The metrics still reward the old behaviour. Colleagues notice the new behaviour and quietly discourage it. Within weeks, the sensible choice is to revert.

This is why I titled my book The System Always Wins. It isn't fatalistic. It's the design brief. If the system will always win, the system has to be part of what you design.

Inside the person: hidden commitments

The second force is inside each participant. Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey's research on Immunity to Change shows that people often hold competing commitments: alongside their sincere wish to change sits an equally real commitment to protect themselves from something the change would expose them to. Behind these commitments sit big assumptions people have never examined, such as "if I delegate this, I'll lose my value".

These commitments aren't laziness or resistance. They are intelligent self-protection, and they are invisible to the person holding them. No amount of content will shift them, because content doesn't touch them.

I'm a certified Immunity to Change facilitator, and it's one of the most powerful tools I know for this.

Why you have to work on both

Most practitioners work on one side. Organisational consultants work on the system. Coaches and many trainers work on the individual. In my experience, working on only one side is exactly why change reverts:

• Change the structure without the person, and people find new ways to recreate the old patterns inside the new structure.
• Change the person without the structure, and the system wears them down.

Learning that sticks is designed for both at once.

Five design principles for training that sticks

1. Start from the behaviour and the situation, not the content.
2. Diagnose the pull-backs before you design, and fix or design around them.
3. Make hidden commitments discussable during the sessions, safely and with real skill.
4. Design the return: managers, peers and sponsors who reinforce the new behaviour at work.
5. Measure behaviour over months, not satisfaction on the day.

Go further: Leadership development programme design · Training design for OD and change initiatives

How to tell whether your training is sticking

Feedback forms tell you whether people liked the session. To know whether it stuck, look for:

• Observable behaviour, two to six months later, in the situations the training targeted. Ask managers, peers and the participants themselves.
• Changes in the work, such as decisions taken at the right level, fewer escalations, or faster handovers, depending on what the training was for.
• Whether the system has moved. Have the measures, meetings and manager behaviours changed to support the new way of working? If not, expect reversion.

A note on the "only 10% of training transfers" statistic

You'll often see claims that only 10–20% of training transfers to the job. The figure is widely repeated, but its origin is an estimate rather than a measured finding, and transfer varies enormously with how training is designed and supported. The real point stands without the statistic: transfer depends far more on design and on the system than on the session itself.

The book

The System Always Wins: Why training doesn't stick sets out this approach in full, with examples from three decades of practice. It's coming soon.

Common questions