Here’s something I’ve noticed after spending more than two decades in workplace learning: when people genuinely want to learn something, you can’t stop them. They find the time. They seek out the resources. They figure it out. Nobody has to manufacture urgency or limit enrollment to get them in the room.
But when people don’t see the point? You could send the most cleverly designed invitation in the world, and it would still end up in the mental junk folder.
That gap — between learning that happens naturally and learning that has to be coaxed and cajoled — is where most organizational training programs live and die. And I think we’ve been solving for the wrong problem.
The Attention Problem Is Actually a Relevance Problem
There’s a lot of conversation right now in the learning and development world about attention. The argument goes something like this: your employees are busy and distracted, so you need to compete for their attention the same way Netflix and Instagram do. Create urgency. Limit seats. Make your content feel scarce.
I understand the logic. I came from the marketing world. I know how these tactics work.
But applying marketing psychology to workplace learning is a bit like solving a nutrition problem by making vegetables look more like candy. You might get people to eat them once. The second time, they know exactly what they’re being sold.
The research on how adults actually learn tells a different story than the attention economy narrative.
What We Know About Adult Learners
Malcolm Knowles spent decades studying how adults approach learning, and what he found runs counter to how most organizations still design training. Adults, he argued, aren’t passive recipients waiting to be filled with knowledge. They’re self-directed. They bring their own experience into the room. And critically — they engage most deeply when the learning connects directly to something they’re already trying to figure out.¹
This isn’t a soft, feel-good idea. It’s a fundamental characteristic of adult cognition. Adults don’t ask “what am I supposed to know?” They ask “why does this matter to me right now?”
When the answer to that second question is clear and compelling, the first question takes care of itself. When it isn’t, no amount of clever marketing will create genuine engagement — just the appearance of it.
Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci spent years building on this foundation through what’s now called Self-Determination Theory. Their research identified three core psychological needs that, when met, drive genuine motivation: autonomy (feeling like you’re choosing to do something), competence (feeling capable of doing it well), and relatedness (feeling connected to others and to something that matters).²
Notice what’s not on that list. Urgency. Scarcity. Fear of missing out. All the anxiety-triggering things people don’t need any more of in their life right now.
And that last part is absolutely real. We’re living through a moment of genuinely elevated anxiety. AI disruption. Economic uncertainty. Political volatility. People are already navigating more ambient stress than they should have to. And into that environment, some L&D practitioners are pouring accelerant — “learn this now or get left behind,” “your skills have a shorter shelf life than ever,” “the window is closing.” It’s effective at manufacturing urgency. It’s also exactly the wrong psychological conditions for learning.
Here’s what the research tells us: anxiety narrows attention and undermines the kind of deep, reflective thinking that learning requires. Stress hormones actively impair the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for working memory, flexible thinking, and the capacity to connect new information to existing knowledge.⁶ When people feel threatened, they go into survival mode — and survival mode is not a learning mode.
Learning, done right, should feel like the opposite of anxiety. It should feel like getting better at something that matters. Like gaining ground. That’s not a soft aspiration. It’s the precondition for the behavioral change you’re actually after.
External pressure can get someone to show up. It cannot make them learn.
The Transfer Problem Nobody Talks About
Here’s a number that should make anyone who budgets for training uncomfortable: research consistently shows that the majority of what people learn in training programs never makes it back to the job.
A foundational meta-analysis by Baldwin, Ford, and colleagues found that training transfer — actually changing behavior in the workplace — depends heavily on factors that most training programs completely ignore: the learner’s motivation going in, the degree to which the content connects to real challenges they face, and whether the work environment supports applying what they learned.³
A more recent industry survey found that while 92% of organizations measure whether participants liked the training, only 41% measure whether behavior actually changed, and just 24% measure any business impact.⁴
Think about that for a moment. We’re spending billions of dollars on training and measuring almost entirely the wrong thing. We’re counting seats filled and satisfaction scores while the behavior we actually wanted to change stays exactly the same.
This is what I mean when I talk about training theater. The production looks good. The audience politely applauds and gives it decent reviews. And then everyone goes back to doing exactly what they were doing before.
So What Actually Works?
If external pressure doesn’t create learning and most training doesn’t change behavior, what does?
The answer isn’t complicated, but it does require a different starting point.
Start with the problem people are already trying to solve. Not the problem you’ve diagnosed from a distance, and not the problem that looks good in an annual report. The actual, specific, right-now frustration your managers and team leaders are walking around with. The conversation that keeps going sideways. The feedback that never quite lands. The new supervisor who’s technically brilliant but losing their team’s trust and doesn’t know why.
When learning is designed around real, current, personally relevant challenges, the motivation question mostly answers itself. People don’t need to be convinced to engage with something that might actually help them with a problem they’re already losing sleep over.
This is what Knowles meant when he wrote about adults being “problem-centered” learners. It’s what Ryan and Deci meant when they talked about the power of autonomous motivation — choosing to do something because it connects to something you genuinely care about, rather than because someone made it feel urgent or scarce.
The research on training transfer confirms it too: motivation going into the learning experience is one of the strongest predictors of whether anything actually changes on the job.⁵
What This Looks Like in Practice
I’ll be 100% candid with you: designing learning around real relevance is harder than designing it around a calendar. It requires actually talking to the people who will participate — not just their managers. It requires being willing to throw out a module that doesn’t land and try something different. It requires measuring behavior change, not just attendance.
But the organizations I’ve worked with that take this approach get results that the event-based, fill-the-seats approach simply cannot produce. Their managers actually start having different conversations. Problems that had been recurring for years stop recurring. And when the next learning opportunity comes around, people actually want to be there.
Not because of a countdown timer or a hard sales pitch. Because the last one was genuinely worth their time.
A Question Worth Sitting With
If you’re responsible for development in your organization — whether formally or informally — I want to leave you with one question:
The last training program you ran: did you measure whether behavior actually changed? And if not, what were you actually measuring?
That’s not a gotcha. It’s an honest question I ask every organization I work with, because the answer tells me more about what’s possible than anything else.
Endnotes
- Knowles, M. S. (1984). Andragogy in action: Applying modern principles of adult learning. Jossey-Bass. Knowles identified five core assumptions of adult learners: self-concept (increasing self-direction), experience (a growing reservoir of experience that shapes learning), readiness to learn (oriented toward developmental roles and tasks), orientation to learning (immediate application rather than future use), and motivation to learn (increasingly internal).
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. SDT identifies three innate psychological needs — autonomy, competence, and relatedness — as essential to intrinsic motivation and sustained engagement.
- Baldwin, T. T., & Ford, J. K. (1988). Transfer of training: A review and directions for future research. Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 63–105. See also: Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T., & Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065–1105. This meta-analysis of 89 empirical studies confirmed that trainee motivation, work environment support, and the relevance of training content are among the strongest predictors of training transfer.
- LEADx. (2025). The LEADx Leadership Development Benchmark Report 2025. The report found that while 92% of organizations measure learner reaction, only 41% measure whether the learning effected behavior change in the participant, and less than a quarter measure the learning’s impact on the business.
- Colquitt, J. A., LePine, J. A., & Noe, R. A. (2000). Toward an integrative theory of training motivation: A meta-analytic path analysis of 20 years of research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(5), 678–707. This landmark meta-analysis found pre-training motivation to be a strong predictor of both learning and subsequent transfer to the job.
- Arnsten, A. F. T. (1998). Catecholamine modulation of prefrontal cortical cognitive function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(11), 436–447. Arnsten’s research demonstrated that elevated stress hormones impair prefrontal cortical function — including working memory, cognitive flexibility, and the capacity for reflective thinking — which are precisely the cognitive processes that learning depends on. See also: Immordino-Yang, M. H., & Damasio, A. (2007). We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), 3–10. Immordino-Yang and Damasio argue that emotion and feeling are not obstacles to learning but foundational to it — and that the emotional context in which learning occurs directly shapes whether new information is processed, retained, and applied.
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