More training is the most reliable way to guarantee that behavior never changes.
Adding is the entire reflex of the field. A rollout stalls, so we add content. The content stalls, so we add nudges, then mandates, then one more deck. Pushing harder feels like doing the work, and it's the surest way to make people dig in.
What moves people runs the other direction, toward clearing what's in the way instead of piling on reasons to move.
Pocket Casts
Above is the HBR IdeaCast conversation with Jonah Berger, the Wharton professor behind The Catalyst, on what works to change someone's mind. Below are my takeaways on why pushing harder backfires and what L&D should do instead when the goal is to get people to actually change how they work.
TL;DR
- Pushing more content at people who haven't changed usually makes them dig in.
- The real job is finding the barrier in the way and removing it, not adding reasons to change.
- Mandatory training creates resistance by taking away the control people most want to keep.
- People cling to the old way because losing it feels more expensive than gaining the new one.
- Ask for a smaller change first, because people move further when the first step doesn't scare them.
1. The push to add more training is why behavior doesn't change
Jonah Berger uses a simple image for why this happens. Push a chair, and it slides where you want it. Push a person, and they shove back. The instinct to add more reasons, more facts, one more PowerPoint comes from the physical world, where pushing works. In the social world, it produces the opposite of what you wanted.
The better question he asks is why the person hasn't changed already. What's the barrier, and how do you remove it?
That reframe is hard for L&D because volume is the thing we control and can show. A course is a deliverable you can point to in a stakeholder meeting. "I removed the thing blocking them" doesn't screenshot as well.
Start before you build anything by diagnosing the actual bottleneck. Jonah did this for a Taco Bell app that people downloaded but never used, and the first move was figuring out which problem it was. Did people not know it existed? Not trust it? Not know how to use it? Each one needs a different fix, and only one of them is a content problem.
Run the same triage on every training request. Sort it into can't-know, don't-believe, or not-allowed. Most requests that arrive as "build training for X" are not-allowed problems wearing a training costume. The team knows what to do. Their manager's metrics still reward the old way, so they don't.
The immediate test is whether you're willing to say so. Sometimes the honest answer to "we need training" is that training won't fix this, which is the last thing a sponsor wants to hear and the first thing that earns their trust next time.
2. Make a course mandatory, and you hand people a reason to resist it
People protect their sense of control. The moment something gets imposed, they push back, even on things they might have chosen on their own.
Jonah points to the Tide Pod mess. After Procter & Gamble and the footballer Rob Gronkowski told people not to eat the pods, he says searches for them jumped more than fourfold and so did calls to poison control. Telling people not to do something sent them straight toward it.
