Someone sent me an article this week. I’m not going to say who wrote it because it doesn’t really matter; you’ve read it before. You’ve probably read it this week. It’s the one that opens in capital letters telling you not to spend your money on training but to invest it in business results instead, and I’ll be honest, for about a paragraph I was quite excited. I thought someone was finally going to say it.

Then the list arrived. Revenue must grow. Leaders must become more effective. Customers must experience greater confidence. Change must be adopted. Talent must progress. Risk must be handled more intelligently. Each on its own line, each with a full stop, like someone reading out the commandments.

Then we got the bit we all know, which is that you can run a great programme, people love it, the feedback’s glowing, and they go back to work and nothing changes. The sale is still lost. The difficult conversation still doesn’t happen. All true. It’s been true since Baldwin and Ford wrote about transfer in 1988, and plenty of people said it before them, but fine, it bears repeating.

So the article has noticed that training often doesn’t change what people do at work. Good. The obvious next question is why not. What’s happening back at work that stops people using what they learned?

It doesn’t ask that. It tells us performance is “a doing thing” and that what people really need is practice, rehearsal, feedback and coaching, a protected first attempt before the real thing.

Hang on. Don’t spend your money on training; spend it on practice, rehearsal, feedback and coaching? That’s training. It’s training with a different name on the invoice, and if I had to guess, it’s training you can buy from whoever wrote the article.

Don’t get me wrong, rehearsal is useful for some things. If you’ve got to tell twenty people their jobs are going, or handle a hostile negotiation, or front up a crisis briefing, practising under something like real pressure helps and there’s decent evidence for it. I’ve no argument with that. My argument is with the logic. The programme didn’t change anything, so the answer is a better programme? That’s the same mistake again with more role play in it.

Because decades of research on why learning doesn’t get used have shown that what happens back at work matters, not just what happens during training. Blume and colleagues pulled the transfer studies together in 2010, and the work environment comes through again and again. Does your manager back you? Do you actually get the chance to use the thing? What happens when you try it? If a leader still creates uncertainty, maybe nobody’s ever told them what they’re allowed to decide. If the difficult conversation still doesn’t happen, maybe the last manager who had one got left on their own when it went to grievance. If the change stalls, maybe it’s a rubbish change, and everyone can see it.

You can rehearse that difficult conversation until you’re word perfect. If having it gets you into trouble, you won’t have it. And frankly you’d be right not to.

Mager and Pipe were saying this in 1970. Could they do it if their life depended on it? If the answer’s yes, it isn’t a skills problem, and more training won’t fix it. Simply put, we’ve had over fifty years to absorb that and we’re still writing articles that skip straight past it to the solution.

The article does have some questions it wants you to ask before you commission anything. How do we need people to perform better, in which situations, what would exceptional look like, how will we know if anything changed? They’re not bad questions. But every one of them assumes the answer is going to be developing people. Not one of them asks what’s getting in the way. And then the closing line, in capitals again, says the real question isn’t whether your training worked but whether your people do. Which sounds good until you think about it for a second and realise it’s put the problem straight back on the person.

I don’t think the people who write these pieces are being cynical, mostly. I think a lot of our industry genuinely can’t see past the intervention, because the intervention is what we know how to sell. But if you want better results, the first job is finding out why people aren’t already doing what you need. Sometimes it is skill, and then yes, let them practise, rehearse, the lot. Often it’s the manager, the process, the incentives, the systems, or nobody ever being clear about what good looks like.

Nobody’s going to put that on a LinkedIn carousel. It’s still where I’d start.