In my travels, talking to trainers, consultants, and most importantly, customers and consumers of those services, a clear pattern emerges about one of the most common reasons training and consulting fail. On one level it’s simple. Training and consulting interventions fail because they are badly conceived, too limited in scope, allocated insufficient resources, or are in plain terms, a bad idea in the first place.
But how do these projects go ahead? Isn’t it the consultant’s or trainer’s responsibility to simply say NO to jobs where it’s impossible to succeed? Well, it certainly should be and that’s part of the expertise that we bring to the table and for which we get paid. Well, for some of us anyway.