Pilots cleverly avoiding training (spot the villain)

This very short posting by David Gurteen is a must read. It describes how pilots cleverly avoid some compulsory e-learning.

The trick for HR is to find the villain.

Is it:
a) lazy pilots who are undermining the company
b) people who design/implement poor e-learning
c) trainers who don't check what learners think of the training
d) management who force trainers to implement training programs that look good on paper without really caring if they accomplish anything.

I'm going to take the generous assumption that everyone is trying to do their best.
So I assume the pilots are right, the training is pointless.
The trainers did their best but didn't have the budget or mandate to do better training needs analysis or training design or follow up to check if it is really working.
Management is under pressure to make the numbers/look good and simply shrug this off as one of those things that they don't have time to fix.

What is the solution?

It is easy to think of specific solutions -- in this case it may just be canceling the training.

One can also think of more general solutions -- insist on proper evaluation of the effectiveness of training (even a 'happy sheet' in this case would have revealed the problem...certainly a few phone calls to the pilots would have).

However, what most interests me are the general forces that lead employees to do the wrong things. One can imagine that if the trainers came back and said "Hey we found out the training isn't working" that no one would have said "Good job!" All the way up the org the discovery would have been perceived as a headache.

Strangely I think they may need a less performance driven culture if they want higher performance. Trainers need to be confident saying "We didn't achieve the objective for that program, let's try something else." HR needs to know jobs or bonuses or budgets are not going to be lost because they are being honest.

The only way to get there is to have time for managers to discuss these sorts of issues to get at root causes. This is not a one off event. Managers need to be meeting quite regularly to discuss what goes right around here, what goes wrong, how are our systems working against us, how can we avoid being stupid? This is how you build an effective culture.

Taking time to invest in maintaining an effective culture is out of sync with the heavy short term performance orientation we see in many companies. But if you want high performance you have to focus a little less on performance and a little more on the overall conditions that lead people to behave in smart honest ways.