Why Training a Process Change Doesn't Work

Training a process-change doesn't work.

It's a mechanics problem. It doesn't really matter how good the slides are. The problem is how people learn.

1. People don't pay attention.

Put a room full of people in front of a PowerPoint and most of them aren't actually listening.

In 2025, 70% of employees admitted to multitasking during training, up from 58% just a year earlier. Flip that around: on a good day, only about 3 in 10 people in the room are giving the material real attention.

If they aren't listening then your information won't change anything.

2. Whatever gets through, they forget.

Now apply the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve to that 30% who were actually paying attention.

Roughly 50% of new information is gone within the first hour, 70% within a day, and by a month out you've lost around 90% of it.

Run the math: 30% attentive × 10% still retained a month later = about 3% of the delivery still in play at 30 days. And that's before anyone has to act on it.

3. Now we get to the real barrier: habits.

Ok, so let's suppose a useful fact survives both of the above filters: someone paid attention and remembered it a month later.

It still has to beat a habit. Likely, whatever you're asking someone to do is going to be different from what they're already doing.

What they're already doing is a habit. Information alone doesn't change habits.

Habits are hard for people to change even when they want to. People spend their whole lives trying to stop biting fingernails or quit smoking.

And you think your powerpoint is going to overcome that?

Nope. 

45% of Americans make New Year's Resolutions, and the majority of those resolutions are to create a new habit or change an old one.

Roughly 8% succeed.

And this is something that a person chose, resolved to do, and in most cases attempted to change.

Even when your people want to change their habits, it's not easy.

So how do you actually win? Each of these problems has a solution. When all 3 solutions run together, the system works.

→ Attention is earned by anticipated need. People tune in to information they believe they'll need. Build a system where someone knows they will need the information.

→ Repetition is what makes it stick. Ebbinghaus didn't just find the decay curve, he found the fix. Every time someone is asked again, the memory gets reinforced and the decay slows, until eventually it's permanent.

→ Habits only break when people habitually anticipate the check. This is the hard one. It requires three things at once: they have to know a check is coming, but what will be checked has to be relatively uncertain, and they have to actually want to pass it. Remove any one of those three, and the habit wins every time.

Training isn't a knowledge problem. It's an attention problem, a memory problem, and a habit problem.

You need a system that can solve all three problems at the same time, or your systems will stay where they are.

180 OPEX can help you build that system.