I was reminded the other day of a book titled ‘The Rhetoric of Reaction’ by Albert O. Hirschman. He was a German economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology. In Rhetoric of Reaction he identifies opposition to social change as consisting of three narratives. These are:

• Peversity
• Futility
• Jeopardy

The idea of social change from a learning perspective has influenced my thinking for the last 15 years and was intrigued by Hirschman’s suggestions. What would these narratives look like in L&D?

Perversity in learning is the suggestion that doing anything will make it worse. This is why people ‘know’ there are performance problems but addressing them will only amplify the fact people know about the problem. What happens is either nothing – no learning activities – or everything – training everyone to manage the gaps of one.

Futility in learning is that doing something won’t make any difference but we do it any way to try and prove we did ‘something’. It doesn’t matter what we do but we can, at least, point to ‘something. This breeds activity bias and vanity metrics to prove what we did had a positive effect, even though it probably didn’t.

Jeopardy argues that the cost of the proposed learning intervention or change of practice is too high because it will damage previous successes and, if it worked before, it will work again. This is why we do the same programmes we have always done but with minor changes to avoid too much jeopardy. If things aren’t as successful, it’s because of the change, not the programme itself.

How much do you recognise of these in your organisation?