The 10 Lies of Learning: Lie #8: “Thou Shalt Comply”

As we continue our countdown of the biggest lies in Learning & Development, we arrive at #8—the persistent myth that mandating learning completion drives behavioral change.

Let me be crystal clear about what I’m addressing here. This is NOT an attack on compliance training itself. Harassment prevention, safety protocols, data security, and other regulatory training serve important ethical, legal and risk management purposes.

What I AM challenging is the “compliance mindset” that has infected how organizations approach non-compliance learning. It’s the mistaken belief that:

“If we require people to complete this training, they will change their behavior.”

This is the dangerous lie that has executives saying things like:

• “Let’s make this new product training mandatory for the entire sales team.”
• “Everyone must complete the customer experience modules by end of quarter.”
• “We need 100% completion on the new strategy rollout materials.”

The compliance approach worked for regulatory requirements—“99% of our people completed the Blankety Blank training!” So naturally, leaders assume the same approach will work for driving actual performance change or skill development. It doesn’t.

While regulatory compliance training drives checkmarks (which is often its primary purpose), this mindset applied to change initiatives or performance improvement programs produces nothing but a race to click through content as quickly as possible. This approach transforms potential learning moments into what amounts to a first-to-complete slide-turning race—driving toward the bottom rungs of performance, not the upper ranks of transformational change.

The Great Compliance Charade

The compliance learning industry is big business. By some estimates, it represents nearly 30% of the total corporate training market, which exceeded $370 billion globally in 2021.¹ Organizations spend billions on mandatory training that:

• Most employees actively resent
• Few can recall in detail weeks later
• Rarely changes actual workplace behavior
• Often exists primarily to shield the organization from liability

This isn’t just inefficient, it’s dishonest. We’re pretending that completion equals competence, that awareness equals action, that sitting through content equals substantive change.

Why This Lie Persists

This particular lie endures for several compelling reasons:

1 – Regulatory Requirements

Many industries face legitimate legal mandates for training. Healthcare has HIPAA, finance has a host of regulations from Dodd-Frank to anti-money laundering requirements, and virtually every workplace has harassment prevention mandates. The regulations typically specify that training must occur, but rarely how effectively.

2 – Legal Protection

As employment attorney Heather Bussing bluntly puts it: “Most compliance training exists so that when something goes wrong, the company can say, ‘But we trained them!’”² It’s about creating a paper trail, not creating change.

3 – Metrics Fixation

Compliance completion rates are easy to measure. Actual behavior change is much harder. When reporting time comes, guess which metric gets the spotlight? 

4 – Genuine Confusion

Many well-intentioned L&D professionals and organizational leaders genuinely believe that information transfer (telling people what to do or not do) leads directly to behavior change. The science of learning and behavior says otherwise, but the intuitive appeal of “tell them and they’ll do it” persists. If the tone of leaders does not reflect a desire for behavioral change instead of just checking the box—reinforcing a compliance mindset—the initiative or campaign L&D is supporting is dead in the water.

You personally have probably experienced the frustration of compliance learning approaches not translating into actual change. I recall working on an assignment in a secure facility—at least three badge swipes before getting to the actual office. As part of my onboarding, I took an elearning about the importance of building security and not letting anyone “tailgate” or otherwise enter without a badge.

The very next day, I recall denying entry to the elevator to someone that did not have a badge. Unbeknownst to me, this person was the area leader—a very senior executive. Word got around and I got a “talking to” about not recognizing who the person was and allowing entry even without a badge. 

In another instance, I had a project with an office looking to change their safety culture. They wanted to infuse a more complete safety mindset, expanding beyond obvious hard hat and steel-toe requirements to areas like parking lot behavior. You won’t be surprised to learn the safety campaign and associated learning program became a joke once word spread that the CEO had a daily habit of revving their car in the parking lot, blowing through the lot exit stop sign, often laying a strip of tire rubber.

In both of those instances there was a belief that requiring security or safety training would equate to a culture change. Whether it be organization wide learning (e.g., building security) or a behavioral change needed in a specific department (sales teams need to do more cross-selling), merely requiring learning completion is not enough. Leaders and program sponsors as well as L&D professionals need to think more broadly about the complexities of changing behavior.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The evidence that traditional compliance training fails to achieve its ostensible goals is overwhelming:

• A 2020 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Business Ethics found that ethics training had, at best, a modest effect on actual ethical behavior, with most of that effect dissipating within 3-6 months.³
• The EEOC’s 2016 report on harassment in the workplace concluded that “much of the training done over the last 30 years has not worked as a prevention tool.”⁴
• Research from CLO Magazine found that employees forget 70% of compliance training content within 24 hours and 90% within a week.⁵
• A study by Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner) found that employees were 13 times more likely to report misconduct when they observed high ethical standards from leadership than when they simply received compliance training.⁶

The True Cost of the Compliance Lie

The damage goes beyond wasted time and resources. When organizations treat compliance as a box-checking exercise, they:

1. Train employees to disengage from learning – When your most frequent learning experiences are painful, you develop learning aversion.
2. Miss opportunities for genuine improvement – Real behavior change requires more than information transfer, and by settling for compliance, we forgo actual development.
3. Create cynicism – When employees see the gap between the stated importance of a topic and the quality of the training, trust erodes, and the misalignment of values to actions is exposed.

From Compliance to Commitment: A Better Way

Let’s be clear: I’m not suggesting we abandon compliance training altogether. Legal and regulatory requirements aren’t going away. The need for organizations to have values and create ethically sound cultures certainly isn’t going anywhere. What I am suggesting is that we need an honest conversation about what mandates in training can and cannot achieve, and we need to approach engagement more effectively.

Here’s what that might look like:

1 – Separate the Goals

Be explicit about distinguishing between:

• Compliance training as evidence of legal documentation (which current approaches might adequately address)
• Actual behavior change (which requires a different more holistic and comprehensive approach)

2 – Design for Humans, Not Regulators

Reevaluate design principles to make them more human-centric and provide value to the learner:

• Instead of a long slog through slides to check a completion box, consider the value of ‘drips’ – microlearning approaches present content in small, focused segments (e.g. blog, podcast, short video) and show 17% higher transfer to job performance than traditional methods.⁷
• Instead of informing, look to involve. Scenario-based learning improves decision-making skills by up to 300% compared to information-only approaches.⁸
• Even rock stars practice their scales. Spaced repetition increases retention by 170% compared to single-session learning.⁹

3 – Leverage Social Dynamics

Ethics and compliance are fundamentally social phenomena:

• Incorporate peer discussion and team-based scenarios
• Make ethical leadership visible through storytelling
• Create communities of practice around compliance topics

4 – Measure What Matters

Go beyond completion metrics:

• Use pre/post assessments of knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intentions
• Track actual incidents and reports over time
• Conduct periodic ethical climate surveys
• Implement mystery shopping or simulations to test real-world application

Case Study: Reimagining Anti-Harassment Training

One large technology company transformed their approach to harassment prevention:

Before: 90-minute annual online module with policy information and basic scenarios, 99% completion rate, continued incidents.

After:

• Brief online module covering legal basics (satisfying documentation requirements)
• Team discussions facilitated by managers using real scenarios
• Leadership modeling through storytelling and transparent handling of issues
• Regular pulse surveys on psychological safety
• Clear metrics on reporting, investigation quality, and resolution time

The Result? Reporting of concerns increased by 27% (initially perceived as negative but actually positive as it revealed previously hidden issues), substantiated claims decreased by 41% over three years, and employee feedback showed dramatically higher engagement with the topic.¹⁰

The Partner Conversation

If you’re an L&D professional faced with a leader who wants to use completion mandates for non-compliance learning, try this conversation:

“I understand you want everyone to complete this product training. We have two approaches we could take. One is a compliance approach that will get you high completion numbers but likely won’t change behavior or performance. The other requires more investment but will actually drive the business results you’re looking for. Which outcome matters more to you?”

This conversation might be uncomfortable, but it’s necessary. The alternative is continuing to perpetuate the fiction that mandated completion is accomplishing goals it was never designed to achieve.

If the leader genuinely just wants documentation of activity—fine! You can design accordingly. But don’t pretend it’s going to transform the organization.

A Compliance Reality Check

Here’s a simple test: If your compliance training disappeared tomorrow, but all the completion records remained in the system, would your organization’s behavior actually change? Would there be more harassment? More security breaches? More ethical lapses?

If your honest answer is “no”—that behavior would remain largely the same without the training itself—then you’re dealing with documentation, not development. And it’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

In our next installment, we’ll explore Lie #7: “Our _ capability [in L&D] is broken and awful”—a common complaint that often misdiagnoses the real organizational learning issues. Until then, take a critical look at your compliance programs and ask whether they’re truly changing behavior or just checking boxes.

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Josh is the founder of Kay/Allison - a firm solving corporate learning and talent development challenges.  He provides strategic advisory, interim/fractional leadership, and complex project management services in the learning and development field.  His 25 years of experience has demonstrated a focus on business impact and clarity punctuated by thoughtful analysis and plain-spoken recommendations.  He is a long standing collaborator with Smartfirm and can be reached through our team or directly at joshlefebvre@kayandallison.com.

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