The Symptom
Rework is usually costed as the visible portion — the time spent redoing something. Its full cost is rarely limited to that, and one of the clearest illustrations is what happens when an investment meant to prevent rework does not achieve what it was meant to.
Consider an organisation where staff complete a training programme, and observed practice three months later shows little change from before the training took place.
What Leaders Usually Conclude
The first instinct is usually to look for an organisational explanation — resistance to new methods, insufficient management reinforcement, competing priorities crowding out the new behaviour. These are reasonable hypotheses in general, and they are frequently the right ones.
Why It Happens
In this specific case, the simpler explanation turns out to hold. On review, the training material is generic, delivered in a single session, with no practice component and no follow-up. Participants rated it well immediately afterwards — and could not apply it a week later. The training was inadequate for the kind of learning it was asking people to do, and no organisational condition needs to be invoked to explain why it didn’t change behaviour. It is worth stating plainly that not every operational failure has a hidden structural cause; some have the cause they appear to have, and the discipline here is resisting the pull toward a more elaborate explanation when a simpler one already fits the evidence.
This connects directly to the cost of rework, because inadequate training is one of the most common upstream sources of downstream rework. When training does not produce durable behaviour change, the gap does not disappear — it reappears later, as errors, as variance between people doing ostensibly the same job differently, and as the rework required to correct the results. The cost of rework, looked at this way, is rarely limited to the hours spent fixing what went wrong the first time. It includes the original training investment that did not achieve its purpose, the compounding cost of inconsistent practice across everyone who went through it, and the opportunity cost of whatever more effective intervention was not pursued instead, because the organisation believed the training requirement had already been met.
None of this is a case for abandoning training as an investment. It is a case for treating “training delivered” and “behaviour changed” as two separate claims, only one of which was actually tested in the scenario above — participant satisfaction immediately after a session is a measure of the session, not of what people can do a week later.
There is a broader consequence worth drawing out. When rework is costed only as the visible hours spent correcting the immediate error, the organisation is implicitly treating the original, inadequate investment as a sunk cost with no ongoing relevance — when in fact it is an active, recurring contributor to the very rework being costed. This matters for how future investment decisions get made. If the connection between the original inadequate training and the ongoing rework is never drawn explicitly, a proposal to invest more seriously in training the next time will be evaluated purely on its own new cost, against a baseline that already, invisibly, includes a substantial and continuing rework tax nobody has traced back to its actual source.
What It Looks Like in Practice
A training or improvement investment shows strong immediate satisfaction scores and little measurable change in practice weeks later.
Rework is costed as the time to redo the immediate task, without tracing it back to whether an earlier investment in preventing it actually achieved what it was meant to.
“Training completed” and “behaviour changed” are treated as equivalent, when only the first has usually been measured.
Single-session, no-practice, no-follow-up formats are used for skills that require sustained behaviour change rather than one-time information transfer.
A further point worth making plainly: this pattern can coexist with a genuinely strong overall training function elsewhere in the organisation. A single inadequate programme, for a single kind of skill, does not indict every training investment the organisation makes — which is precisely why it is worth evaluating each specific programme against what it was actually asking people to be able to do, rather than assuming either uniform competence or uniform inadequacy across all training simply because one instance has been examined closely.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- Where rework is currently being tracked, has anyone traced it back to whether an earlier training or process investment actually changed behaviour, or only whether it was delivered?
- Is participant satisfaction immediately after a session being used as evidence that the session worked?
- What is the format of training being used for the specific kind of learning being asked for, and does the format match what that learning requires?
- Is the format of this training matched to what it is asking people to be able to do?
More on this topic: Operations.
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