The £40,000 workshop everyone forgot by Monday

A marketing team of sixty sat through a very good day of training. Good speaker, good slides, genuine enthusiasm in the room at four o'clock. By the following Wednesday the campaign calendar was being maintained exactly as it had been the month before, and the only measurable change was the invoice.

Behaviour changes when the new way is the easiest way to finish today's work, not when it is the most interesting thing you heard on Thursday.

Why capability-led training fails

Training built around capability — here is what the tool can do — leaves everyone to work out the mapping from capability to their own Tuesday afternoon. Most people are too busy to do that mapping, so they don't, and the day evaporates.

The one design change

Build the programme around the team's actual processes and the digital plumbing underneath them: the brief that takes four days, the report that takes six hours, the enquiry that sits in a shared inbox. Teach against those, measure the before and after in hours, and give someone the job of owning each one afterwards.