Course requests often arrive after the diagnosis has been skipped. A workshop request rarely turns up as an open question but arrives with a solution already attached: a course; a target audience; a format and duration; and sometimes even a supplier.

What is usually missing is the diagnosis that would justify any of it.

The request assumes the problem is a gap in individual ability and that training will close it. Neither assumption may have been tested. The performance issue might sit in workload, unclear authority, a process that was never redesigned around the new way of working, or management practices that undermine whatever the training teaches. None of that gets surfaced by accepting the request at face value and building the course.

Answering the request as given produces a workshop. It does not necessarily resolve the performance problem. The two are treated as the same thing far too often. The useful response is not to scope the course faster. It is to reopen the request.

What is the performance problem? What is causing it? Does training address any part of that cause? Sometimes the diagnosis confirms the original request. Often it changes the audience, the format or the response entirely.

That work has to happen before the brief is written, not after the intervention has been delivered and the performance problem remains.