Seeing Lasting ResultsI know a dedicated trainer who loved to tell his audiences that
“education (or training) without action was just entertainment.”
He was wonderful at making materials entertaining and memorable. And
yet he well knew the 80/20 rule for his and all training events - that
80% of the event’s contents were lost by the time the participants
had reached their parked cars. In the workplace one week later, that
number was up to 100% lost. It would be hard to find a lower ROI in
business.
Why is implementation so difficult? Usually, part of the answer appears
when rationalizing why “change” is so difficult. We blame
habits (hard to break), industry (ours is different), environment (won’t
work in “your location here”), culture (we don’t trust
outsiders wearing ties), prior experience (we tried something like that
once and it failed) and on and on. The reality is that implementation
is a force that won’t work unless it can overcome two other forces:
inertia and resistance. Most failures to implement arise from an underestimation
of organizational inertia and a failure to assess the sources of internal
resistance.