Last month I had a new ceiling installed in my home office. In preparation, I had to remove all of the furniture. This meant moving all the books off the bookshelves, including a shelf full of notebooks from seminars and workshops I attended.
This was a sobering experience. As I boxed up each notebook, I remembered how I had committed to not let the valuable content just sit on the shelf. I was going to implement it as soon as I got home!
While that was true for a few of the notebooks, it was decidedly not true for most of them. The trend continued as I boxed up more and more books on leadership, productivity, and presence. Ouch!
I suspect I am not alone in this lament. I invested in training, hoping it would lead to transformation. Too often, it simply stayed as information.
Statistics bear this out. According to an article in the HR Daily Advisor, "On average, companies in the US spent about $1,207 per employee on training in 2023, a slight increase from $1,071 in 2021. Large companies typically allocate more funds, with an average expenditure of $1,689 per learner, compared to $826 for midsize companies and $1,396 for small companies."
In addition to the dollars spent, the average employee received over 60 hours of training during the year -- including both face-to-face and online training.
What are organizations (and employees) gaining from that investment? The short answer is, "it depends."
When I was working in nonprofit management, the state of California required a set number of hours of sexual harassment training. The "training" that our non-profit paid for with donor dollars was a series of slides with long lists of bullet points and accompanying audio. In order to meet the minimum hours requirement, the audio speed was fixed. No speeding this up! Worse, the audio didn't add anything to the content -- the speaker was simply (and slowly) reading the words on the slides. If I remember correctly, there was short quiz at the end, based solely on the content. No role play, no discussion, no interaction. Nothing to deal with the complex issues of potential workplace harassment. Just information delivered poorly so that the box could be checked and the state satisfied.
I had a similar experience on a recent drive to North Carolina. I was listening to a "blink" from Blinkist. I won't mention the book title, but it was about leadership, productivity, and habits. The audio blink condensed the entire book down to 18 minutes. This created a "summary" of multiple chapters, each with dozens of bullet points.
I'm not sure when, but my brain turned off somewhere in the middle. It was too much information delivered without context or illustrations (presumably left out since this was a summary). Even if I had been reading instead of listening, the results would have been similar.
You may have had experiences like this -- hours spent listening to talking heads -- on or offline. Or reading dozens of books or blog articles, only to go back and realize the information didn't take. There was no real transformation -- no long-lasting life change.
I love to read. More than that, I love to learn. I've long lost count, but have averaged 20 or more books a year for more than 40 years. A friend of a similar age calculated she had listened to more than 4000 sermons in her lifetime. Add in conferences and seminars and the amount of learning content is even higher. If you're of a different generation than mine, substitute podcasts or videos for books; e-courses for conferences and seminars; and add posts on Reddit, Discord, and the like to your learning list.
Why is this so often the case? There are two painful truths that we have to face.
Painful Truth #1: Information does not equal Transformation
Consider these statistics --
"Digital information has become so entrenched in all aspects of our lives and society, that the recent growth in information production appears unstoppable. Each day on Earth we generate 500 million tweets, 294 billion emails, 4 million gigabytes of Facebook data, 65 billion WhatsApp messages and 720,000 hours of new content added daily on YouTube."
We have more information being produced daily than in thousands of years of previous human history. It would take someone 82 years of watching YouTube 24/7/365 to consume just one day of new YouTube content. If you're like me and watch at 2x speed, that's still 41 years.
Even if you could consume all of that, the truth is that information does not lead to transformation. Knowledge does not equal wisdom, much less transformation -- even knowledge that's skillfully presented.
Which leads to the second painful truth...
Painful Truth #2: Inspiration does not equal transformation
There's nothing like the burst of energy and enthusiasm that comes from a speaker who is passionate and truly alive! Given the choice, I'd much rather hear -- or read -- from someone full of energy and creativity as they deliver their content. That beats boring every time.
But is it enough? How often have you heard an energizing message, or read a powerful piece, and made a commitment to change -- to live in the future differently than you've live in the past? Me, too. When it comes to transformation, inspiration isn't enough -- without application and implementation, we are left with a warm fuzzy feeling and not a lot of change.
The "two I's" -- information and inspiration -- are not enough to lead to real life change. That's the bad news.
Check back next week for part two where I share some good news -- the four elements that lead to implementation and transformation.
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