By Michael Nagorski, Founding Partner, Double Loop Performance
The Coin Isn’t the Problem
You cannot pay someone into doing something they are not structurally capable of doing. Every dollar you’ve ever spent on training that didn’t stick proves it — you just didn’t want to call it that.
I was recently at the WorldatWork Sales Compensation Conference, sitting in a session on incentive design, when the presenter brought someone up on stage to make the point live instead of talking about it. He asked her to jump 1,000 yards. Then he started offering money. Ten dollars. Fifty. A hundred. He kept raising the number, and she kept standing there, because the ask itself didn’t get any more physically possible just because the number attached to it got bigger. By the time he hit $100,000, the room was laughing — not at her, but at the offer, at how stupid it sounded to keep raising a number against a wall that money couldn’t touch. That’s “coin-operated behavior” exposed for what it actually is: the comforting lie that if you pay someone enough, structure the incentive right, the behavior follows. Drop the coin in, get the performance out.
Ninety seconds and the whole theory was dead on the floor. Money never changed what was possible. It just changed how long it took the room to notice.
We run the identical bet every single time we approve a training budget, add more tech to the stack, or hire a coach. Invest in the input, expect the output to follow. And when the output doesn’t show up, we do something she never did up on that stage — we don’t just stand there and let the math speak for itself. We point. The training was generic. The tool didn’t fit our workflow. The vendor overpromised. We fire the vendor and keep the machine that broke the training in the first place.
Ask yourself the question you don’t actually want answered: what if the investment was never the problem? What if it’s the org chart, the incentive structure, the manager who never once asked about it after the workshop ended?
Why Training Transfer Fails: The Research
Training transfer — whether skills learned in a program actually show up back on the job — has been studied in organizational psychology for decades. The findings are consistent in a way that should make procurement teams nervous. Transfer isn’t primarily a function of how good the training was. It’s a function of what happens after the training ends, which means most training evaluations are measuring the wrong three months.
A study on managerial leadership programs found individual and organizational factors shaped whether skills stuck differently at different points in time, and that transfer and maintenance needed to be measured as separate phases, because a skill can generalize into the workplace and still fail to survive month three. Read that twice. The skill can work and still die. Another study following leaders three months after a development program found that the leaders who set explicit personal goals for behavior change were rated as having improved more than those who didn’t — meaning the training itself wasn’t the differentiator, the follow-through structure was.
A study of hotel employees in Taiwan is even more direct about where the lift actually comes from. Training motivation predicted transfer, and transfer predicted job performance, but the study specifically flagged perceived organizational support as an antecedent that enhanced the whole chain. Not the training content. The support structure around it. A separate study on police driver training found the same pattern: personality traits like conscientiousness predicted better transfer, but that effect only showed up when officers also had the opportunity to perform what they’d learned. Skill without structural opportunity just sits there, decaying, until someone in finance asks why the numbers didn’t change.
If you’ve ever sat in a post-mortem and heard “the training didn’t work,” you were watching a group of smart people avoid the actual finding. The research isn’t saying training doesn’t work. It’s saying training works conditionally, and the condition is almost never inside the training itself.
Why We Default to Blaming the Investment
Blaming the input is easier than examining the system, because examining the system means admitting you built it. The org chart that never got redesigned. The incentives left untouched, still rewarding the old behavior while everyone applauds the new slide deck. The manager who was never coached to reinforce anything and doesn’t know that’s their job.
MIT Sloan’s research on organizational effectiveness gets at this from a different angle. Work design problems often stay invisible until they create a crisis, because knowledge work is harder to see than a factory floor. You can watch a production line and spot the bottleneck in an afternoon. You cannot watch a sales team’s coaching gap the same way — it hides for two quarters and then shows up as a line item marked “training investment: underperformed.” The research makes the case that organizational effectiveness isn’t about having fewer problems, it’s about surfacing them before they calcify into someone else’s fault.
The investment gave you an outcome. It just wasn’t the outcome you were measuring for, because nothing accounted for the conditions the investment was dropped into. You didn’t get a bad answer. You asked the wrong question and billed it to the training budget.
Structure Beats Skill: The 60/30/10 Split
Here’s a number that should make you rethink every training dollar you’ve ever approved. Research on team effectiveness — built on decades of work by Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman — attributes roughly 60% of a team’s effectiveness to structural design features, versus 30% to how the team was launched and only 10% to ongoing coaching. Structure isn’t a supporting actor in performance. It’s most of the show, and coaching — the thing most training budgets are entirely built around — is the smallest lever in the room.
Flip that lens onto a training investment and the math turns embarrassing fast. If structure accounts for the majority of team performance, a training program dropped into a broken structure was never asked to succeed. It was asked to cover for sixty percent of the problem using ten percent of the leverage, and then it got blamed when the math didn’t work.
| Factor | Share of Team Effectiveness | What It Means for a Training Investment |
| Structural design | ~60% | Roles, incentives, decision rights, workflow — untouched by most training rollouts |
| Team launch | ~30% | How the change was introduced, framed, and resourced at the start |
| Ongoing coaching | ~10% | The reinforcement most orgs cut first when budgets tighten |
“Perceived organizational support” is a key phrase here. It’s not a soft HR concept you nod at in a deck. It’s the mechanism that decides whether a new skill lives past the workshop or dies in the parking lot, and most organizations never build it on purpose.
Organizational Readiness Is a Claim, Not a Fact
“We’re ready for this” is not a diagnosis. It’s a vibe with a budget attached. It’s the same thing a person says before they go run five miles for the first time in three years, based entirely on how they feel standing in the driveway, not on anything their knees have actually been asked to do.
The training-transfer literature keeps surfacing the same missing step: the environment the change was moving into was never assessed before the change got funded. A study on training program design for federal inspectors general found transfer improved when programs were built around the actual job environment trainees were returning to, not generic competency models pulled off a shelf. A review of five distinct “types of use” trainees exhibit after a workshop — performing, assessing, explaining, instructing, leading — found that most measurement stops at “did they perform the skill once,” which is the professional equivalent of declaring a marathon finished at the first mile marker.
This doesn’t happen because leaders are careless. It happens because assessing structural readiness is slower and far less flattering than announcing a new initiative in an all-hands. No one gets applause in a kickoff meeting for saying “before we roll this out, let’s map the decision rights, incentive conflicts, and manager reinforcement gaps that could kill this in month four.” That person sounds like a buzzkill. They’re also the only one in the room who’s right.
Before the Next Dollar Goes Out
If you’re about to invest in training, a tool, or a new way of working, stop asking “will this work.” That question flatters you and tells you nothing. Ask instead: what structure is this moving into, and has anyone actually looked at it. Check incentive alignment — does the comp plan reward the old behavior or the new one. Check decision rights — does the person you’re asking to change actually control the variables involved. Check manager reinforcement — is there a single human whose job it is to notice, three months out, whether the new skill got used or quietly abandoned.
Skip that diagnostic and the pattern repeats exactly the way it always has: invest, watch the lift never show up, blame the coin. The coin was never broken. You just never checked the machine before you dropped it in.
Curious what your organization’s actual readiness looks like before the next investment? Take the RENDER assessment — a short diagnostic built to surface the structural gaps most teams don’t see until the budget’s already spent.
About The Author
Michael Nagorski is the Founding Partner of Double Loop Performance, an organizational development and leadership consulting practice based in Newark, Delaware. He works with executive teams, change leaders, and facilitators who are tired of talking about the right things and ready to actually do them.
Michael has spent more than 15 years helping organizations at inflection points — when they need to move differently without losing what made them good. That has ranged from designing decision-making frameworks for Fortune 500 sales organizations to building facilitation systems for senior leadership teams navigating strategy execution, technology adoption, and culture change.
His work lives at the intersection of facilitation design, behavioral science, and organizational accountability — with a strong bias toward the practical over the theoretical.
He holds graduate degrees from the University of Delaware in Organizational Development and Change and Business Administration, and is the developer of the MEET Funnel methodology for structured decision facilitation.
Contact Double Loop Performance or contact Mike directly through LinkedIn.