I once spent an hour arguing with a training manager.

I gave her situation after situation — cases where I was certain training wasn't the answer. She listened carefully each time. She couldn't counter the examples. Then she'd pause and say: "I still think training can solve it."

After the fourth or fifth round of this, I realized something. She wasn't being stubborn. She genuinely believed it. Training was her hammer, and every error in front of her looked like a nail.

That conversation forced me to articulate something I'd been sitting on for a while.

When I first took on the retail operations team at OH, every store was relatively new. The staff had been trained in the clinical work — phlebotomy, sample handling — but almost nothing else. Escalations were coming in regularly. When I asked what was being done about it, the answer was always: the training team hasn't given us anything yet.

I had abdicated. I expected training to figure out the requirement, write the SOP, and then deliver it. I'd made training responsible for the quality of work I was supposed to own.

That's when I understood something I hadn't seen as clearly before. When your entire product is the human interaction, training stops being an HR function and becomes your core operations lever. Think about why people pay a premium at a certain hotel group or a certain coffee chain — it's not because the coffee is meaningfully better. It's because they know exactly what experience they will get, in every location, every time. That consistency is built on SOPs, audits, and training that someone owns seriously.

So I started taking training seriously. And then I started noticing where it didn't work.

One of the things we had was a grooming standard. Every field medic gets checked on it twice a day — photograph taken, everything verified: shirt ironed, nails trimmed, hair combed, shoes polished. Miss the standard, you don't go out, and you're penalized.

I noticed that a large portion of my trainers' time was going into something called grooming RCAs. Every time someone was penalized, a ticket was cut and sent to training. The trainer would then call the person and explain why grooming standards matter.

When I looked at the cases, most were repeats. The same person, third penalty, getting a call about why you should comb your hair.

I had to sit with that for a moment. We all know what a comb is for. This person knew — they'd passed the grooming check dozens of times before. They were choosing not to comply, for whatever reason. And our response was to send a trainer to teach them why they should comb their hair.

That's not a training failure. That's a discipline/enforcement failure being laundered through the training department.

That experience pushed me toward a cleaner mental model.

Think of it like a child's education. The business — the parent — wants the child to graduate. They define what graduation looks like, and they own the syllabus for getting there. Training's job is to take that syllabus and build the best possible book — clear, comprehensive, easy to absorb. Discipline and enforcement ensure the child actually reads it, studies it, and passes the test.

When business abdicates the syllabus and hands it to training, the whole system breaks. Training ends up guessing at standards they don't own. And when the child fails, everyone looks at the book.

That's when the three buckets became clear to me.

Training — They don't know, or can't do it. The knowledge or skill is missing.

Discipline — They know and can, but don't. The knowledge exists. The execution doesn't.

Systemic — They know, they can, they try, but something prevents them. The system itself is broken.

Each bucket has a different owner and a different fix. Mixing them up wastes time, money, and goodwill.

Gate 1: Is it training?

Start here. Only here.

Did they know this task exists? Did they know it was important? Did they know how to do it? Did they have the skill to execute it?

Three ways to check quickly. Look at their history — have they done this correctly before? If yes, they know. Not training. Test them directly — ask them to explain it or demonstrate it. If they can, the knowledge is there. And look at the pattern — if they fail every single time without exception, they may not know. If they sometimes succeed, they know. Something else is causing the failure.

If the answer to any of Gate 1 is yes — invest in training.

If no — move on. Don't keep reaching for that lever.

Gate 2: Is it discipline?

They know. They can. They're not doing it.

Ask why. Is it harder than it should be — extra effort that goes unrecognized? Is it unclear when exactly it's supposed to happen? Does anyone check if it gets done? Are there perverse incentives — situations where not doing it is actually easier or safer for them?

The grooming RCA case is a clean example. Every medic knew the standard. They'd demonstrated it repeatedly. Some were choosing not to follow it, probably because the penalty felt worth skipping on a busy morning. Sending a trainer in was theater. The fix was enforcement, visibility, and making non-compliance consistently costly.

Gate 3: What remains is systemic.

Take your best people. Trained. Motivated. No discipline issues. Put them in front of this task.

Do they still fail?

If yes — the system won't let them succeed. Something structural is broken.

I've seen this with search tools that require exact spelling. A well-trained, motivated medic tries to pull up a patient record, types the name slightly differently, finds nothing. It looks like a mistake. It's a database architecture problem. No amount of training or discipline enforcement changes that outcome.

When your best people consistently fail at something, stop looking at the people.

Go vertical before you go wide.

The temptation is to train everyone, then enforce discipline with everyone, then discover the systemic issues — by which point you've wasted months and burned credibility.

Don't do that.

Pick twenty people. Train them properly. Enforce discipline. Watch what errors remain. What persists after trained, disciplined people try their best — that's your systemic problem. Fix it. Then scale.

You find systemic problems in three weeks with twenty people. With a thousand people, you find them in six months, buried under noise.

The pattern holds regardless of the numbers: training reduces errors, discipline reduces them further, and whatever floor you're stuck at after both — that's the system's doing.

Know your floor. Don't burn training and discipline trying to fix something only a system change can fix.

The sequence, when something goes wrong:

First question, only question: did they not know, or couldn't they do it?

If yes — fix training.

If no — why aren't they doing what they know? Fix discipline and enforcement.

If errors persist after both — find your best people, watch them fail, and fix the system.

Stop laundering your ops failures through your trainers.

I still think about that training manager. She was smart, experienced, and genuinely cared about her team's work. But her mental model had only one intervention. When all you have is training, everything looks like a knowledge gap.

If a student fails an exam, you ask if they studied. You don't ask if they had books — you assume they did.

We've been asking the wrong question first for a long time.

Not the only way. Probably not even the best way. Just one practitioner's version that worked.

~Discovering Turiya@work@life