Nobody Adopts a Tool Because You Trained Them On It

Every rollout I've ever worked on has had a moment where someone on the leadership team asks, "Have they been trained yet?" — like training is the finish line. Like once the session's on the calendar and the attendance is logged, the job is done and adoption just happens on its own.

It doesn't. I've watched it not happen more times than I can count, across a global bank, a logistics company, and a startup trying to scale production out of a warehouse in another country. Different industries, completely different problems on paper, same failure mode every time: the org treats training as the deliverable instead of treating adoption as the goal, and those are not the same thing.

Here's what actually predicts whether people use the new system, the new process, the new whatever-it-is. Not whether they sat through a session. Whether the thing solves a problem they already knew they had, whether their manager visibly uses it too, and whether the old way of doing things is actually gone or just quietly still available as a workaround. That's it. That's most of the game. You can have the best-designed eLearning module in the world and it will lose every time to a manager who says "just email me the old spreadsheet, it's faster."

I spent years building the learning content — the job aids, the simulations, the facilitator guides — and I still believe good instructional design matters. But I stopped believing it was the lever a long time ago. The lever is upstream of training: it's whether the people rolling this out actually removed the alternative, whether the messaging came from someone the audience trusts, and whether anyone bothered to find out what was actually going to be hard about the change before they built the response to it.

The most complicated systems change I ever worked on wasn't complicated because the tool was hard to use. It was complicated because roughly 4,500 people across more than 50 countries all had slightly different reasons to resist it, and no single training module was ever going to address all of those reasons at once. What worked was building different paths for different groups — self-directed tools for the people who barely touched the system, hands-on sessions for the super-users, direct executive-level sessions for the people whose visible buy-in everyone else was watching for. Training was one piece of that. It was never the whole plan.

If your organization is measuring change success by attendance in a training session, you're measuring the wrong thing. Attendance tells you people showed up. It tells you nothing about whether they went back to their desk and did it the old way anyway.

If you're in the middle of a rollout and adoption isn't sticking the way leadership expected, I'd be glad to compare notes. Connect with me on LinkedIn, or reach out through The Learning Plan if it's the kind of thing that needs more than a conversation.