There’s something that happens all the time in training, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Courses are created with good design, solid content, even visually appealing… and still, they don’t change anything. People complete them, answer the questions, get their certificate… and then go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.
And the usual reaction is: “we need more content”, “we should explain it better”, “maybe it needs more depth”.
But no. That’s usually not where the problem is.
The problem isn’t what you teach, it’s what you’re teaching it for
Most courses are designed so that someone understands something, not so that they do something differently afterwards.
And even if it sounds similar, it’s not.
Understanding doesn’t mean action. In fact, a lot of the time we fully understand what we should do… and still don’t do it.
That’s where the real design problem starts.
If you’re not clear on what behavior you want to change, everything else is built on air.
Learning is not the same as change
This has been studied for years. For example, in the work of David Kolb, the idea was already there: real learning happens through experience, reflection, and application, not just exposure to information.
And later, books like Make It Stick reinforce the same thing: it’s retrieval and application that make learning stick, not simply going through content.
The problem is that many courses are still built as if “explaining well” was enough.
It isn’t.
Too much content works against you
Another key point is cognitive load.
When you add too much information, what happens is not that people learn more, but that they process less.
John Sweller explains this clearly with cognitive load theory: the brain has a limit to what it can handle at once, so when you overload it, it starts filtering, simplifying, or simply disengaging.
And this happens a lot in courses.
There’s an attempt to “cover everything”, and in the end, nothing really sticks.
So what actually makes a course change something?
This is where the whole approach shifts.
A course that works doesn’t start with content. It starts with a very specific question:
What do I want this person to do differently tomorrow?
Not “what do I want them to know”, not “what do I want them to understand”.
What do I want them to do.
From there, everything changes:
- The content becomes more focused
- The activities start to make sense
- The decisions feel real
- And most importantly, the learning gets closer to the real context
Designing for decisions, not for information
One of the most powerful shifts you can make is this: stop thinking in terms of “content blocks” and start thinking in terms of real situations.
Because in real life, no one is dealing with theory. They’re dealing with decisions.
And if the course doesn’t train those decisions, it’s not preparing for anything.
This is where the approach in Design for How People Learn becomes especially useful, because it insists on something very simple: don’t design for understanding, design for action.
A real example of what actually changes behavior
Imagine a company launching a course about giving feedback between managers and their teams.
The course is well made: it explains what feedback is, why it matters, includes well-known models, even nicely written examples. People complete it, answer correctly, and overall it seems successful.
But weeks go by… and nothing changes.
Managers still avoid uncomfortable conversations, or when they have them, they’re still vague, unclear, or too soft. In other words, the real behavior hasn’t moved.
Now shift the approach.
Instead of designing the course around “what feedback is”, it’s designed around a specific situation:
a manager has to tell someone on their team that their performance has dropped over the last few weeks.
From there, everything is built around that decision:
- What to actually say
- How to start the conversation
- What to do if the other person gets defensive
- How to close it without leaving things unclear
And instead of explaining theory, the course puts the learner straight into the situation, forcing them to choose, to respond, to get it wrong, and to see the consequences.
Now you’re not evaluating whether someone “understands feedback”, you’re training whether they can actually do it in a real moment.
And that’s where change starts to happen.
Less content, more intention
This can feel uncomfortable at first, because it means removing things.
Removing explanations, removing theory, removing “just in case” content.
But when you do it well, the result is much clearer.
The course stops being a collection of information and becomes a focused experience.
And that’s when things start to actually change.
If I had to sum it up in one idea
If you design for learning, people might learn.
But if you design for action, it’s much more likely they’ll change.
And in the end, that’s the only thing that really matters.
