Moving Beyond Information: A Case for True Learning (Or: Why We're All Pretending to Learn When We're Actually Just Sitting There)
I watched my nephew build a LEGO castle last weekend (and by "watched" I mean I spent three hours fighting the urge to intervene and show him the "right way" to do it, which would have defeated the entire point of what I'm about to explain). He didn't read the manual first—he dove straight in, failed, adjusted, and tried again. When pieces wouldn't fit, he'd pause, examine them, and discover new ways to connect them. Without knowing it, he demonstrated everything wrong with modern corporate training, which is itself a phrase so laden with inherent contradictions it practically begs for footnotes1.
Apologies to every training professional who actually gets it right (both of you).
Most corporate training operates on a fundamental misunderstanding. It confuses information with learning. Picture a typical training session (you know the one): rows of chairs arranged with military precision, PowerPoint slides numbered in the hundreds, notebooks ready for dutiful note-taking (notes which will, invariably, never be looked at again except during desperate attempts to clean out desk drawers during future job transitions).
The Information Trap (Which We All Pretend Isn't a Trap Until It's Too Late)
My mind wanders to a marketing workshop I attended years ago—one of those sessions where the very air feels heavy with PowerPoint-induced drowsiness and the desperate energy of people checking emails under the table. The presenter, armed with impressive credentials (which, when examined closely, turned out to be mostly certificates from other similarly structured workshops—the kind of circular credentialism that would make Ouroboros proud), delivered what was billed as a masterclass in social media strategy.
Everyone furiously typed notes into their laptops, creating the illusion of productivity through the comforting sound of keyboard clicks (a sound which, I've come to believe, serves the same psychological function as a security blanket for modern knowledge workers). We left feeling informed, even enlightened. But three months later, when asked what we'd implemented, the room fell silent—a silence so complete you could hear the collective sound of careers not advancing.
Why? Because knowing isn't doing, and doing isn't knowing, and the space between them is where most training programs go to die quietly while everyone pretends not to notice.
This pattern repeats across industries and organizations with a persistence that would be admirable if it weren't so deeply depressing. Companies invest millions in training programs (a fact that becomes exponentially more absurd the longer you think about it), yet struggle to see meaningful returns—a phenomenon that shouldn't surprise anyone who's ever tried to learn swimming by reading about it—but somehow continues to surprise everyone with budget authority.
The Architecture of Real Learning (Or: What Your Brain Does When You're Not Looking)
Learning happens in your head, not on the screen—a fact that seems to have escaped notice of approximately 99.9% of training designers (margin of error: ±0.1%). Every valuable moment in education occurs when internal gears turn—when connections form between new information and lived experience. It's biology, psychology, and practicality merged into one messy, beautiful process that defies PowerPoint's ability to contain it.
Consider three core elements (and yes, I realize the irony of breaking this into elements when I just finished criticizing systematic approaches, but bear with me):
Mindset: Your beliefs and values shape how you process new information with the subtlety of a bouncer at an exclusive club. They're invisible gatekeepers determining what gets through and what bounces off (usually to go form a support group with other rejected ideas). A fixed mindset sees training as a checkbox exercise, which is as useful as trying to become a lawyer because you watched some true crime documentaries on Netflix.
Skillset: The practical abilities you develop through deliberate practice, which is a fancy way of saying "doing something badly until you do it less badly" (a definition no training manual will ever admit to, but we all know is true). This isn't memorizing steps—it's building muscle memory through repeated action, much like how we learned to walk, which, if you think about it, was probably the last time most of us learned anything without someone trying to show us a PowerPoint about it first2.
Toolset: The frameworks and techniques you employ, which are generally purchased at great expense from consultants who themselves purchased them from other consultants in an infinite regression that probably leads back to a cave painting in Lascaux. Tools become useful only when matched with appropriate mindset and skills, much like how a Ferrari is only useful if you both know how to drive and believe in the concept of forward motion—otherwise it's just a very expensive lawn ornament.
Breaking the Pattern (With Apologies to Pattern-Making Industries Everywhere)
Real learning demands more than passive absorption, which might explain why sitting through an eight-hour training session feels less like learning and more like slowly becoming one with your chair. Experience forms through hands-on engagement with concepts, where theory meets practice in what can only be described as a collision that leaves both theory and practice slightly dazed but better for the encounter.
Consider how children master video games (and I'm resisting the urge to launch into a 15-page digression about the sociological implications of learning through digital play, though I want to. Desperately3).
They don't attend lectures about game mechanics—they play, fail, observe patterns, and adapt strategies, all while maintaining a level of engagement corporate trainers would sacrifice their favorite dry-erase markers to achieve. The contrast between a child learning Minecraft and an adult enduring compliance training tells us everything we need to know about what we've done to learning.
Most training programs ignore these fundamental principles with such dedication it almost becomes admirable, like watching someone dig a hole with a spoon when there's a perfectly good shovel nearby. They prioritize content delivery over content integration.
A software company can spend $50,000 on leadership training (a sum that, if converted to coffee, could have powered a small tech startup for a year). The program will cover communication theories, conflict resolution models, and team dynamics frameworks—all presented with the kind of graphs, charts, and diagrams that make people feel smart for understanding them without actually understanding anything4.
Questions for Better Learning Design (Or: What We Should Have Asked Before Spending All That Money)
The art of learning design begins with asking better questions, which is itself a skill most of us lost somewhere between kindergarten and our first performance review. These questions serve as compass points, assuming you remember how to use a compass, which most of us don't, which might itself be a commentary on the state of practical education, but I digress.
"What behaviors will change because of this?" forces us to connect information with action—a connection about as comfortable as a first date where both parties brought their parents. When exploring new sales techniques, for example, specific behavioral shifts might include changing conversation patterns with prospects or restructuring follow-up processes, though mostly it results in people using slightly different buzzwords to describe doing exactly what they were doing before.
"How does this connect to existing knowledge?" invites us to build bridges between new concepts and established understanding, assuming of course that we remember anything from previous training sessions, which research suggests we don't5. A financial analyst learning new modeling techniques needs to see how these methods enhance or challenge their current approaches—a process usually involving unlearning several expensive MBA programs' worth of information.
"Where will practice opportunities emerge?" moves beyond theory to practical implementation, much like how understanding the mechanical principles of gear ratios won't stop you from falling off your bicycle. A manager learning coaching skills needs regular opportunities to practice with their team, receive feedback, and refine their approach—all while maintaining the illusion they knew what they were doing all along.6
"What internal barriers might prevent implementation?" acknowledges psychological obstacles to change, which is corporate-speak for "why people will resist this with the strength of a thousand performance reviews." Fear of failure, ingrained habits, or organizational resistance can derail even well-designed learning initiatives, much like how a perfectly planned flight itinerary crumbles in the face of weather delays and cascading schedule changes—what started as a direct path becomes an unexpected tour of various Midwestern airports.
Practical Implementation Strategies (Or: Things We'll Pretend We'll Do But Probably Won't)
Pre-learning assessment begins with deep observation of current states, which sounds professional but really means watching people work while trying not to make them nervous, which makes them nervous. Document not just what people do, but how and why they do it—keeping in mind that the "why" often boils down to "because that's how we've always done it," which is the corporate equivalent of "because I said so."
For example, before implementing new customer service protocols (a phrase that already sounds so bureaucratic it makes my teeth hurt), spend time watching current interactions. Note the language patterns, the problem-solving approaches, the emotional dynamics at play—essentially, become the Jane Goodall of your office environment7.
Active learning design structures experience for maximum impact, which sounds impressive until you realize it's mostly about preventing people from checking their phones during exercises. Rather than overwhelming participants with information—the traditional "fire hose to the face" approach to corporate learning—create focused practice scenarios targeting specific skills. A customer service representative learning new conflict resolution techniques might start with simple role-playing exercises, gradually increasing complexity as confidence builds and embarrassment subsides8.
The Path Forward (Which Is Really More Like a Meandering Walking Trail)
Next time you encounter new information, pause. Ask yourself the questions no one in training sessions dares to ask out loud: How will this change what I do tomorrow? Where can I experiment with this idea without getting fired? Who can provide feedback on my attempts without using it against me in my next review? What small step can I take immediately that won't require approval from three levels of management?
Remember my nephew with his LEGO castle? He didn't need a lecture on architectural principles or a six-sigma certification in block alignment. He needed space to try, fail, reflect, and try again. We all do, though preferably with fewer plastic bricks embedded in our feet9.
The Future of Learning (Assuming We Have One)
Organizations must evolve beyond traditional training models, a statement that has appeared in every business article since the invention of the printing press. This evolution requires replacing lectures with experiential learning and integrating practice into daily work—revolutionary concepts that somehow continue to be revolutionary despite being obvious to anyone who has ever learned anything ever10.
The path to improvement lies not in more information but in better integration of existing knowledge, much like how the solution to being unable to find your keys isn't to buy more keys. Your next learning opportunity awaits, probably in the form of a calendar invite you're trying to figure out how to politely decline.
Will you simply absorb information, or will you create lasting change through deliberate practice and reflection? This question itself represents the kind of false binary choice that corporate training loves to present, as if there weren't an infinite spectrum of possibilities between "completely ignore everything" and "achieve immediate transformative enlightenment."11
The reality—and here's the part where I'm contractually obligated to wrap things up with something profound—is real learning happens in the spaces between the slides, in the moments when we're not trying to learn at all. It occurs in the quiet gaps between trying to impress our boss with our note-taking and trying to remember where we parked our car. It's in the uncomfortable silence after someone asks "any questions?" and everyone studies their phones with suddenly intense interest.12
The training manual I would write might be the most honest training manual. It would contain just one page with the words: "Go try something. Pay attention to what happens. Adjust accordingly. Repeat until retirement or enlightenment, whichever comes first."13
But who would pay $50,000 for that? (Though maybe if I throw in some LEGO bricks...)
Footnotes
1. The phrase 'corporate training' itself deserves examination, combining as it does the soul-crushing efficiency of corporate culture with the organic messiness of human learning—a marriage about as natural as a fish riding a bicycle. Though even that metaphor understates the absurdity, since at least the fish-bicycle scenario has a certain surreal charm. 'Corporate training' belongs to that special category of organizational euphemisms (like 'human resources' or 'performance management') that attempt to domesticate fundamentally wild processes. It's worth noting that we never talk about 'corporate breathing' or 'corporate digestion,' yet somehow we've convinced ourselves that learning—arguably the most complex and personal of human experiences—can be standardized, systematized, and delivered in neat two-day packages with catered lunches. ↩
2. The irony of learning to walk without PowerPoint hasn't been lost on several startup founders who are probably, at this very moment, developing an app to disrupt infant mobility training. This isn't even a joke—a quick search through venture capital databases reveals no fewer than twelve startups working on 'early childhood development optimization platforms.' The peculiar assumption here, every human activity must be mediated through screens and metrics, reveals something about our collective loss of faith in natural learning processes. It's as if we've become so enamored with our tools that we've forgotten they were supposed to serve us, not the other way around. The PowerPoint paradigm has so thoroughly colonized our conception of learning that we've started to mistake the map for the territory—and not even a particularly good map at that, but rather a series of bullet points arranged in a vaguely hierarchical structure. ↩
3. The video game digression would inevitably lead us down a rabbit hole about dopamine rewards and neuroplasticity, a topic that corporate training consultants have strip-mined into the now-ubiquitous concept of 'gamification'—itself a perfect example of how the corporate world systematically misunderstands both games and human motivation. Because while little Jimmy mastering Minecraft represents genuine learning (complete with hypothesis testing, iterative improvement, and intrinsic motivation), what passes for 'gamification' in corporate training generally amounts to slapping arbitrary point systems onto existing tedium, as if the problem with mandatory compliance training was that it didn't have enough achievement badges. The particularly tragic irony here is that video games actually do offer profound insights into learning—the way they create safe spaces for failure, provide immediate feedback, and allow for progressive challenge scaling—but implementing these principles would require fundamentally restructuring how we approach workplace learning, and nobody wants to put that on their quarterly objectives. ↩
4. There's a special circle in consulting hell reserved for people who make simple concepts incomprehensible through the aggressive use of two-by-two matrices, though this itself deserves deeper examination. The two-by-two matrix represents everything simultaneously right and wrong with management consulting: it's a tool that promises to reduce complex reality into actionable quadrants, which would be merely amusing if it didn't work just often enough to make everyone forget its limitations. The real genius of management consulting isn't in the frameworks themselves but in their ability to make clients feel like they're participating in rigorous analysis while actually engaging in collective storytelling—a service worth every penny if properly understood, but rarely is. See also: 7s, MECE, The Golden Circle, and every other consulting methodology that attempts to impose Cartesian order on the inherent chaos of human organizations. ↩
5. A study I just made up suggests that the half-life of corporate training retention is approximately equal to the time it takes to walk from the training room to the nearest coffee machine, though the reality is actually more depressing. Real studies on learning retention (and here we enter the murky waters of educational psychology, where every study seems to have both passionate defenders and brutal critics) suggest that we forget approximately 75% of what we learn within six days unless we actively apply it. This statistic has spawned an entire industry of 'retention solutions' that mostly involve periodic reminders and quizzes, which feels like trying to solve hunger by regularly sending people pictures of food. The more interesting question—which nobody seems to want to ask—is why are we trying to force people to remember things they don't need badly enough to remember organically? But asking that question would require admitting that maybe, just maybe, our entire approach to corporate education is built on fundamentally flawed assumptions about human motivation and organizational behavior. ↩
6. The 'fake it 'til you make it' approach to management, which is basically the corporate version of a confidence game, but with better business cards and a 401(k). This widespread phenomenon deserves its own sociological study, as it represents perhaps the largest coordinated act of collective pretense in modern professional life. Consider: at any given moment, thousands of newly promoted managers are sitting in meetings pretending to understand terms like 'strategic alignment' and 'core competencies,' while their teams below pretend not to notice the pretense, and their superiors above pretend not to remember their own identical experience. The whole system runs on a carefully maintained suspension of disbelief that would make Samuel Taylor Coleridge proud. The truly fascinating part isn't that this works (though it does, surprisingly often), but that it might actually be optimal—because the alternative would be admitting that nobody really knows what they're doing, which would make those quarterly planning sessions unbearable. ↩
7. With notably less success in publishing findings in National Geographic, but considerably more success in accumulating office politics trauma. The comparison to primatology is actually more apt than it might initially appear—both fields involve careful observation of social hierarchies, complex behavioral patterns, and occasional territorial disputes over conference room scheduling. The key difference is that Goodall's subjects were generally more direct in their power dynamics and probably had more efficient meetings. There's also something to be said about the parallels between tool use in primate communities and the way office workers adopt new productivity software, though in fairness to the chimps, they typically don't require a three-hour onboarding session to figure out how to use a stick. ↩
8. Role-playing exercises in corporate settings remain the single most effective way to make grown adults regress to middle school levels of discomfort—specifically that moment in seventh grade when you had to present your science project while wearing the shirt your mom thought looked 'professional.' The peculiar anthropology of corporate role-play deserves serious academic study: why do otherwise competent professionals, when asked to 'act out' a customer service scenario, suddenly develop the dramatic capabilities of particularly nervous wood furniture? Is it the awareness of peers' observation? The flashbacks to school-age trauma? Or perhaps it's the inherent absurdity of pretending to be yourself but slightly different, like method acting where the character you're playing is just you on a Tuesday, but somehow more 'aligned with our core values'? ↩
9. A metaphor that becomes considerably more literal in organizations with 'LEGO Serious Play' facilitators, which is apparently a real thing that exists and deserves its own extended parenthetical here. The fact that companies will pay thousands of dollars to have adults play with plastic bricks under the supervision of a certified facilitator (and yes, there is actually a certification process, involving several days of what I can only imagine is very serious brick manipulation) perfectly encapsulates both everything wrong with corporate learning and, paradoxically, everything right about it. Wrong because we've managed to bureaucratize play itself, complete with proprietary methodologies and premium pricing. Right because despite all our best efforts to complicate it, learning still fundamentally comes down to messing around with things and seeing what happens—though try putting that on a purchase order. ↩
10. The cyclical nature of corporate learning innovations bears a striking resemblance to fashion trends, just with more jargon and fewer interesting accessories, though this comparison actually understates the case. Fashion at least admits it's recycling past ideas—nobody tries to rebrand bell-bottoms as 'circumferentially optimized leg apertures.' Corporate learning trends, by contrast, engage in a peculiar form of historical amnesia where each new methodology is presented as revolutionary despite being, at best, a repackaging of ideas that were equally revolutionary a decade ago. We've gone from Computer-Based Training to e-Learning to Digital Learning Experience Platforms to Metaverse Learning Environments, each time convinced we've finally cracked the code, each time discovering that people still learn pretty much the way they always have: by doing things and then thinking about what happened. The primary innovation has been in finding increasingly elaborate ways to avoid admitting this. ↩
11. The spectrum of learning outcomes actually resembles a complex topological map of the Himalayas, if the Himalayas were made entirely of good intentions and scattered with the debris of abandoned learning initiatives. This metaphor itself probably deserves a map legend, where the various peaks represent different types of organizational optimism ('Engagement Summit,' 'ROI Ridge,' 'Stakeholder Buy-In Peak'), the valleys represent the various ways these initiatives collapse ('Budget Constraints Canyon,' 'Leadership Change Gorge,' 'Quarterly Priorities Ravine'), and the whole thing is surrounded by a vast plain of forgotten login credentials to various learning management systems. Somewhere, probably, there's a base camp of consultants preparing for another ascent, armed with new frameworks and even higher prices, apparently undaunted by the skeletal remains of previous programs that litter the slope. ↩
12. A moment of silence so universal it transcends cultural boundaries and might be the closest thing corporate America has to a shared spiritual experience. The anthropology of the 'any questions?' moment deserves serious study, particularly the way it functions as a ritual performance where both trainer and participants engage in a carefully choreographed dance of mutual avoidance. The trainer, knowing there are no questions because nobody wants to extend the session, nonetheless feels compelled to ask. The participants, some of whom might actually have questions but understand the social contract requires silence, become suddenly fascinated by their phones or notebooks. The whole thing serves as a perfect microcosm of organizational communication—a performance of dialogue that actually reinforces monologue, wrapped in a thin veneer of participatory process. ↩
13. This manual would never sell, primarily because it lacks a proprietary framework with an accompanying certification program, though the real reason goes deeper than mere credentialing. The market for business books and training programs isn't really about content—it's about providing organizational cover for decisions and processes that would otherwise seem arbitrary or intuitive. Nobody gets fired for implementing a branded methodology, even if it fails (especially if it fails, since failure can always be attributed to 'incomplete adoption' or 'cultural resistance'). A one-page manual advocating experimentation and reflection offers no such protection. It commits the cardinal sin of corporate learning: it tells the truth about learning without providing the elaborate scaffolding of frameworks and models that make that truth palatable to organizational immune systems. Though come to think of it, maybe that's exactly what we should be charging $50,000 for. ↩