It is this myth, that training is the "silver bullet" that will improve organisational outcomes without the need to attend to the workplace environment of trainees, that we need to dispel. The illusion here is that somehow once we get staff into a training room and they return to work that the organisation will change for the better – defect rates will fall, more product will be sold, managers will be more empathetic, discrimination will cease in the workplace, or whatever was the purpose behind the training will eventuate magically without further work required.
Even the term "training intervention" lulls us into a false sense of surety that all that is required to "fix" the problem or bring about change is a time boxed and isolated training "event". The upshot of this is that much of what goes by way of training in organisations today is akin to a fish cleaning exercise. We take the fish out of the bowl, very carefully clean each one and then put them back in the bowl from whence they came.