Why training still wins #2

"Reminder that when your leaders are primarily interested in consolidating power and building fiefdoms, they sap the organisation of its ability to optimise decision making."

Charles Lambdin

'Why training still' wins is a regular theme - either directly or indirectly in my blog. I wrote on this around this time last year (see January 5th 2024 post).

At this time of the year there's the perennial noise from edtech vendor sales teams and vendor CLO missionaries on how corporate L&D should ditch training and buy their platform instead. 

The entrenchment of training is simply a symptom of the dominance of control based leadership. It reflects the power dynamics at play - and inevitably the status quo system continues to deliver.

Here's the simple power play:

Leaders believe they know best

The role of 'training' is to create a standardised workforce (immediately assumes people are robots and operating on a stable, sanitised environment - both wrong, but hey) 

'Training' is a misnomer - in reality its a proxy for sharing long form content from 'the centre' (see point one)

This is ideal as leaders know what people need to know and so what they need to tell them

Vendors collude in facilitating this content sharing - safe in the knowledge that the only measure in town is 'how many saw it?'

L&D collude in this too - as its easier to reinforce their contribution by adding 'and people liked it!' (plays beautifully into points one and two).

And around it goes.

So of course the vast majority of what's (lazily) badged as 'training' isn't training and there are many ways to change this for the better (see Moore, Jennings, Wallace, Quinn, Mosher, Matthews, Shackleton-Jones et-al).

But it's the power dynamics - the risk of the new expectations and new commitments that come with aligning the system to the alternative - that make the status quo the status quo.