Why does experiential training stick when classroom training fades?

Why is so much training forgotten?

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton gave this problem its name in 2000: the knowing–doing gap. Organisations accumulate a great deal of knowledge about how to manage well, and a fraction of it shows up in what people actually do on Monday morning. Their diagnosis was blunt. Plans, analysis and presentations get mistaken for action.

The same gap opens inside a training room. A leader can define active listening accurately, score well on a quiz about it, and still interrupt a colleague ninety seconds into a difficult conversation. The definition sits in one part of the mind. The interruption comes from somewhere else — habit, time pressure, the pull of being right.

Behaviour under pressure has more in common with a motor skill than with a fact. Nobody expects a person to swim after reading about swimming. Giving feedback, staying open when challenged, holding a pause instead of filling it: these work the same way. They need repetition, feedback, and a slightly uncomfortable moment to be practised in.

How much training actually reaches the job?

You may have heard that only 10% of training transfers to the workplace. It is worth pausing on that number, because it is almost certainly wrong. Researchers traced it back to a 1982 article in which Georgenson was speculating aloud about what training directors tend to say. Fitzpatrick (2001) and Saks (2002) later pointed out that the figure had never been established empirically. It has been repeated for four decades on the strength of an aside.

The real evidence is less dramatic and far more useful. Saks and Belcourt (2006) surveyed training professionals across 150 organisations. They found that 62% of employees applied what they had learned immediately after the training. At six months, 44%. At one year, 34%.

Training transfers, then. And then it drains away. Roughly half of what arrives on day one has gone within a year.

What does the research say makes training stick?

Timothy Baldwin and Kevin Ford's 1988 review in Personnel Psychology remains the foundation of this field. Reviewing eighty years of studies, they grouped everything that influences transfer into three families: the characteristics of the people attending, the design of the training itself, and the work environment they return to. The subtle finding is about how these act. Training design influences transfer through learning and retention. The person and the environment act on transfer directly.

Blume, Ford, Baldwin and Huang (2010) pooled 89 empirical studies in the Journal of Management and confirmed the pattern. Transfer is positively related to cognitive ability, conscientiousness, motivation, and a supportive work environment.

Read those two together and the conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone selling a training day. What happens in the room is one part of the answer. What people bring in with them, and what they walk back out into, carry the rest.

David Kolb (1984) describes the mechanism inside the room. Learning runs a cycle: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, active experimentation. Have the experience. Notice what happened. Name the principle. Try it again, differently. A lecture hands people the third stage and skips the other three, which is why the principle sounds obvious and changes nothing.

Why does practising under mild pressure transfer?

Rehearsal works best when the rehearsal resembles the real thing. Mild pressure — being watched, having to respond now, having to build on what a colleague has just said — draws on the same attention and emotional regulation that a real meeting demands. Practise a behaviour once under that load and it becomes available to you under load.

There is a second effect, and it may matter more. Experiential settings let people get things wrong cheaply. Someone offers an idea that lands badly, recovers, carries on, and discovers within about four seconds that the world did not end. Do that eight times in an afternoon, in front of the colleagues whose opinion they care about, and the meaning of a mistake quietly shifts. That shift is what people carry back to the meeting where a risky idea needs saying out loud.

Motivation, which Blume and colleagues identified as a consistent predictor, is largely produced this way. People who have already done the thing once arrive at work with evidence that they can.

What does a training designed for transfer look like?

Saks and Belcourt found that activities before, during and after training were each positively related to whether the training transferred. That gives a practical shape to any programme worth commissioning.

Before the day, participants understand why they are there and which problem the training addresses. Their manager understands it too. Motivation is not a mood people happen to arrive in; it is manufactured in the fortnight beforehand by whether anyone told them this mattered.

During the day, most of the time goes on doing rather than watching. Every experience is followed by reflection — the second stage of Kolb's cycle, and the one most often cut when the agenda runs long. The principle gets named by the participants themselves, out loud, in their own words.

Afterwards, the behaviour gets reinforced. A reminder at day seven. A peer conversation at day twenty-one. A manager who asks how the difficult conversation went. Without that scaffolding, the curve Saks and Belcourt measured takes its course.

Is experiential training suitable for serious topics?

The objection usually arrives sounding reasonable. Restructuring, safety failures, difficult feedback, redundancy conversations — surely these are too consequential for practice-based learning?

The high-stakes professions answered this question long ago. Pilots train in simulators. Surgeons rehearse on models. Emergency crews run drills. Nobody has ever suggested a lecture on engine failure. The greater the consequence, the stronger the case for having done the thing once already, somewhere the cost of getting it wrong is nothing.

What should you look for?

This reasoning is why we work the way we do at IMPROV Communication. Our trainings put people into situations where the behaviour has to happen — listening properly, building on a colleague's idea, recovering when something lands badly — and our facilitators hold the reflection that turns a moment into a principle a person can use on Tuesday. The behavioural change participants report afterwards grows out of having practised, in the room, the thing they want to do at work. The five guiding principles give them the language to keep practising once they leave.

If you are weighing up a programme for your leaders or your teams, ask any supplier two questions. How much of the day will my people spend doing the thing? And what happens in the thirty days afterwards? Our leadership training is designed around both answers, and the evidence on whether applied improv works sets out what participants tell us six months later.

If it would help to talk it through, we are always happy to have that conversation.

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References

• Baldwin, T. T., & Ford, J. K. (1988). Transfer of Training: A Review and Directions for Future Research. Personnel Psychology, 41, 63–105.
• Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T., & Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of Training: A Meta-Analytic Review. Journal of Management, 36, 1065–1105.
• Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice Hall.
• Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I. (2000). The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. Harvard Business School Press.
• Saks, A. M., & Belcourt, M. (2006). An investigation of training activities and transfer of training in organizations. Human Resource Management, 45, 629–648.
• Ford, J. K., & Yelon, S. L. (2011). How much is transferred from training to the job? The 10% delusion as a catalyst for thinking about transfer. Performance Improvement Quarterly.

Further reading: What is Applied Improv? · Applied improv for leadership development