Every business has a line on the P&L that quietly dwarfs the others, and if you employ people rather than doing every job yourself, that line is your people. According to Training Magazine’s 2025 Industry Report, companies seem to understand this instinctively, which is part of why in America they spent roughly 102.8 billion dollars on training last year. The money spent is real and the intent behind it was right, but a lot of it quietly leaked back out through the forgetting curve, the well-documented pattern where people lose an average of around 90 percent of what they learn within a month unless something reinforces it. The most important way to NOT fall victim to that is to engage the one step that would tell anyone whether the money you’re about to spend is aimed at the right target.
In this week’s video on audaciousconceptsinc.com, I walk you through what happens when a leader treats an expensive, complex situation like conflict or rework, like they’re dropping a $300k Bentley at Jiffy Lube and expecting it to come back better than ever.
The step that many miss is a proper diagnosis; instead, they jump straight into a fix, any fix that seems reasonable. The challenge is you don’t always know if it’s just a rough week or a real problem. Let’s explore three signals that help you confirm when underperformance has crossed into an actual pattern that spells trouble.
When there’s a problem, are you a leader who reaches for the easy fix?
The failure rate of these fixes is worse than most leaders assume. The reason the lunch and learn does not stick is rarely the quality of the content. Research on training transfer is genuinely brutal on this point. A meta-analysis by Blume and colleagues found the average transfer rate sits somewhere around 10 to 15 percent, and broader reviews put the share of learning that never shows up in how people actually work between 60 and 90 percent. So when you send a team to communication training and the same friction resurfaces a few weeks in, you’re not watching people fail. You are watching a reasonable-looking solution sail right past the problem it was supposed to solve.
The reason this keeps happening comes down to reflex. When something goes wrong, the pressure is to act, and act fast. Action feels like leadership; taking the time to make a proper diagnosis feels like a delay. So conflict gets filed as a communication problem, a productivity dip gets filed as an accountability problem, and steady attrition gets filed as a culture problem. Each of those labels arrives with a training program already attached to it, which means the label quietly determines the fix before anyone has confirmed the label was accurate in the first place. Would a physician worth their license hand you a prescription before running tests so they know what was wrong? Yet in business we reach for the prescription first and call it being decisive.
The biggest risk here is that almost every off-the-shelf fix a leader reaches for lives in one of two places. Communication work, or emotional intelligence programs, to boost morale, but these are motivation initiatives, and they all operate on a single layer of human intelligence… The affective layer, meaning how people feel. Skills training and process documentation operate on the cognitive layer, meaning what people know. Both of those layers are legitimate, and both are occasionally the right target. However, there is a third layer that almost no reflexive fix ever touches, and it is frequently the one generating the pattern in the first place. That is the conative layer, the way a person is instinctively wired to take action when nobody is telling them how.
Picture the person who cannot move until they have gathered every last fact, avoiding the risk of making a mistake, sitting beside the person who is already sketching a prototype with little information to go on before the meeting is over. Neither one is right or wrong; they are simply wired to take action differently. Now put the first person in a role that demands constant improvisation, or drop the second into a role that runs on methodical documentation, and you get underperformance that looks for all the world like a bad attitude or a skills gap. It is neither of those things. It is a conative mismatch, and no volume of accountability training will resolve it, because accountability was never the broken part. The role and the wiring were pulling against each other the entire time, and every day that continues, the organization keeps paying a quiet friction tax in rework, workarounds, bottlenecks and the sheer energy people burn fighting their own instincts to hit a standard the role was never built to let them reach.
This is why the question I raise in the episode carries more weight than it first appears. Before you ask how do I fix this, ask yourself what problem am I actually solving. It reads like a small reframe. It changes everything downstream, because the cost of solving the wrong problem is not confined to a wasted training budget. When a misdiagnosis eventually pushes a capable person out the door, Gallup estimates the replacement runs between 50 and 200 percent of that person’s annual salary, and pegs the total drag of voluntary turnover on US businesses at around a trillion dollars a year. A great portion of that loss to turnover wasn’t just because your people were the problem; you lose it because the diagnosis was.
When the diagnosis is right, the whole picture gets easier and usually cheaper. The fixes that were never going to land stop draining the budget, the same people stop cycling through the same programs on repeat, and the pattern you’ve been fighting for months finally resolves instead of quietly growing back, because you are at last working the layer that was generating it all along. This work eliminates the forgetting curve altogether. That is the entire discipline in a sentence, and the good news is that taking this step is easier than you would think.
If you are living with people problems that keep surviving your best fixes, the fastest way to find out whether you are looking at a wiring issue or something else entirely is the 14-Day Strategic Alignment Audit. In two weeks it shows you where the friction is actually coming from, so your next move solves the real problem rather than the one that was easiest to name. You can start there at audaciousconceptsinc.com, or reach out to us at support@alicicouri.com, or subscribe to the Aligned, Audacious and Agile newsletter on LinkedIn for the thinking between episodes.
This is the first of three conversations on diagnosis. Next time we look at what happens when you hire a genuinely great person into a role that was never really architected right in the first place. I’ll see you there.