The air in Conference Room 3 smells like industrial-strength lemon cleaner and the slow-motion death of 23 souls. I am watching Leo M.-C., an inventory reconciliation specialist whose patience is usually as structured as his meticulously color-coded filing system, slowly disassemble a paperclip with the precision of a watchmaker. He’s been at it for 103 minutes. At the front of the room, a consultant named Gary-who wears a headset and a level of unearned enthusiasm that should be illegal before noon-is clicking through a slide deck titled ‘Module 13: Synergistic Data Entry Pathways.’

Gary has never stepped foot in our warehouse. He doesn’t know that the WiFi drops out every time the heavy-duty freight elevator reaches the 3rd floor, or that Leo has to manually override 403 SKU entries every Tuesday because the legacy database and this new ‘revolutionary’ software speak two entirely different languages of resentment. Gary is teaching us how to navigate a menu tree that none of us will ever climb, while the actual trees of our daily workload are currently being chopped down and stacked into a backlogged bonfire outside this door.

I’ve spent the morning organizing my digital files by color, a nervous habit I developed after 13 years in corporate logistics. It provides a veneer of control in an environment where we are being ‘up-skilled’ into oblivion. This is the third time this year we’ve sat through a mandatory, day-long session for a tool that promises to save us 33 minutes a day but requires 153 minutes of troubleshooting just to log in.

Training, as it is practiced in the modern enterprise, is often nothing more than a funeral for a project. We mistake the delivery of information for the building of capability. But adults don’t learn by being told; we learn by doing, failing, and having someone nearby to catch the falling glass before it shatters. Leo knows this. He’s currently ignoring Gary to sketch a workflow on the back of a napkin that actually accounts for the 13 different ways the inventory reconciliation fails when the humidity in the loading bay rises above 63 percent.

I remember a time, about 3 years ago, when I actually thought these sessions were the solution. I was younger, perhaps more naive, and I believed that a well-designed manual could solve a systemic lack of process. I once spent 43 hours designing a training manual for a CRM that no one ever opened. Not even once.

Leo catches my eye. He raises an eyebrow, a silent communication between two people who know the 3,003 ways a database can lie to you. He knows that when we leave this room, Gary will take his $5,003 daily fee and disappear, leaving us to figure out why the ‘Auto-Reconcile’ button just deleted the records for 83 pallets of medical-grade silicone. The company treats adoption as a discrete event-a Tuesday in March-rather than a messy, ongoing process of human adaptation.

We prioritize the project plan over the people. We treat the software as the hero of the story and the employees as merely the necessary, slightly inconvenient peripherals required to operate it. It’s a failure of empathy. True adoption doesn’t happen in the conference room; it happens in the 3 minutes of panic when a user realizes they’ve just hit ‘delete’ on a master record and doesn’t know how to undo it.

It happens in the quiet moments of peer-to-peer coaching. It happens when the leadership builds in the buffer for friction. Instead, we are here, listening to Gary explain ‘User Permissions Level 3,’ while 233 unread emails are screaming for our attention.

We need to stop calling this ‘training.’ It’s more like a forced march through a landscape of irrelevant features. If we were serious about building capability, we would be on the floor, at the desks, looking at real-time data and solving real-time headaches. We would be acknowledging that Leo’s expertise isn’t in knowing which button to click, but in knowing when the data ‘feels’ wrong. That intuition is something Gary and his 333-slide deck can never touch.

I’ve seen how different it looks when the focus shifts from the tool to the human being. It requires humility. It requires admitting that the ‘experts’ in the room are the ones currently holding the broken paperclips. When you work with a partner like Debbie Breuls & Associates, the conversation changes from ‘How do we use this?’ to ‘How does this actually help Leo do his job?’ They stay in the trenches until the new way of working becomes the only way of working.

We’ve spent $43,000 on this software license, but we’re spending $0 on the actual behavioral change required to make it work. It’s like buying a Ferrari and then giving the keys to someone who has only ever ridden a tricycle, after a 3-hour lecture on the history of internal combustion.

The tragedy is that there is actual potential in this new tool. It could, if implemented with a shred of human context, actually eliminate the 103 hours of manual data entry Leo performs every month. But because the training is disconnected from his reality, he will resist it. Not because he hates change, but because he loves his job too much to let a poorly understood tool ruin it.

Adults learn through relevance. If Gary had started the day by saying, ‘I know the freight elevator kills your WiFi, so here is how this tool caches data offline so you don’t lose your work,’ he would have had 23 people leaning in. Instead, he started with the corporate mission statement. He lost us at the first ‘synergy.’

I’m going to go talk to Leo after this. Not about the software, but about those 43 pending reports. I’m going to ask him what he actually needs. Because at the end of the 13-hour rollout, the only thing that matters is whether the people feel supported or merely ‘trained.’ We’ve had enough training. We need a partner who understands that the real work starts when the slides stop flickering.