What if you were the key internal resource person with learning expertise?
What if you advocated, recommended, and prescribed low-volume, high-cost face-to-face training?
What if your advocacy was so successful that global partners invested hundreds of millions of dollars in what you prescribed – even in the absence of any standard to determine the return on that investment?
What if your recommended approach resulted in zero measurable impact?
What if partners nevertheless kept spending on training, entrenching perverse incentives like per diem to substitute for motivation, evidence, and results?
What if you ignored and then dismissed, for as long as you possibly could, the relevance and potential of digital networks to support learning?
What if you then managed to replicate the worst, least effective kinds of training through sterile digital formats of slides with voiceovers and a quiz at the end?
What if you kept badgering managers to get their people to stop work in order to learn?
What if you responded to the disconnect between learning and work with convoluted competency frameworks and elaborate performance management “solutions” that changed nothing?
What if you used your internal position as gatekeeper to stifle innovation, to ridicule and undermine those advocating new approaches?
What if you then felt threatened when these new approaches began to show results that you have never been able to achieve?
What if you were held accountable for any or all of the above?
Image: Defoe in the Pillory (Wikipedia Commons).