Why Most Training Fails to Create Lasting Change & How to Fix It
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin
Every year, organisations spend crores on training programs.
Classrooms are booked. Trainers are hired. PowerPoints are prepared.
Employees attend, listen, participate… and then, within weeks, the old patterns return.
The intent is there. The effort is there. But the impact? Often short-lived.
Why? Because training is not transformation.
And learning does not always equal performance.
The Common Trap: Information Overload
In both corporate boardrooms and college auditoriums, we see the same pattern. Training is treated like a knowledge delivery exercise, the trainer speaks, the learner listens, notes are taken, maybe a role-play happens… and that’s it.
From an instructional design perspective, this is only Stage 1 – Knowledge.
But the journey to performance has other stages:
Comprehension → Application → Habit → Culture.
When organisations stop at the first stage, they get educated learner, but not capable performers.
The Psychology of Why We Forget
Psychology gives us a very clear answer:
Our brains are wired to forget what we don’t use.
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve shows that after a single training session, we lose up to 70% of what we learned within 24 hours if it is not reinforced.
Add to this:
- Workplace distractions
- Competing priorities
- Lack of managerial support
and even the most engaging training quickly fades from memory.
This happens because the new learning has not yet been linked to a strong anchor in the learner’s daily environment. Without that anchor, the brain does not see it as “important for survival” so it lets it go.
Learning is only valuable when it changes the way we live or work.
Philosophy reminds us that information is not wisdom.
A library is full of knowledge, but it cannot make decisions or solve problems until a human being applies it meaningfully.
In the same way, a workplace full of trained employees can still underperform if the training doesn’t lead to behavioural change.
In educational settings, we have seen the power of scaffolded learning where concepts are introduced step-by-step, with practice and feedback at each stage.
Students don’t just hear a concept; they use it repeatedly until it becomes second nature.
When it comes to corporates, this scaffolding is often missing.
Workshops are isolated events, not part of a continuous learning journey.
The moment the session ends, the momentum dies.
The Missing Link: Reinforcement + Environment
From years of working with both corporate and academic audiences, here is what we have learned:
The real magic happens between sessions, not during them.
To turn learners into performers, we need three critical elements:
-
Emotional Readiness Before Training
- People learn best when they see why it matters to them.
- This means pre-training communication, manager briefings, and even short mindset videos before Day 1.
-
Immediate Application After Training
- If a skill is taught on Monday, the learner should apply it in some form by Tuesday.
- Small assignments, real-world challenges, or “practice in your own role” exercises work far better than theoretical follow-ups.
-
Behavioural Anchoring
- Use NLP anchoring and environmental cues to make the skill part of daily routine.
- Example: a leader practicing active listening every time they open their email; a sales executive running a 2-minute role-play before client calls.
-
Supportive Culture
- Managers and peers must reinforce the change.
- Without a supportive environment, even the best learners will revert to old habits.
A Simple Analogy
Think of training like planting a seed.
- The classroom session is planting the seed.
- Application is watering it.
- Reinforcement is sunlight.
- Culture is the soil that allows it to grow.
Without all four, the plant won’t survive, no matter how good the seed was.
Closing Thoughts:
Training is the spark. Application is the fire.
If we want lasting change, we must stop seeing training as an event and start treating it as a designed journey, guided by psychology, reinforced by environment, and supported by leadership.
That’s how learners become performers.
And performers, in turn, become the culture carriers of the organisation.
If your last training program didn’t create the shift you expected, it’s not your people, it’s the missing link in the process.
Reach out to Dee-Cognito to design a learning journey that sticks.