The Danger of sliding on the Learning Curve!

While training becomes more and more critical for people and organizations, it is increasingly turning up in the headlines of daily news as a failed solution to problems, as a big solution for big problems or as a justification to do something controversial.

Here are a few examples I have collected in the last months from newspapers, the internet and in general public discourse to explain what I mean.

Training is often seen as the failed solution to many problems.
"Poor training" is said to be the cause of failed expensive software implementations across federal agencies, "Lack of training of the intervention personnel" is indicated as the reason for weak responses to natural disasters. Perpetrators of human rights abuses on prisoners have been defined as "…staff lacking training on the guidelines against torture". Do we need a "Training anti-defamation league" to respond to these allegations?

Training is also seen as the "silver bullet" for solving big problems.
"Better training for teachers", is the solution to the nation's failing public schools system. "Increased funds for training" should solve high unemployment rates and poor GDP growth. Surprise: "Training" is also the solution for abuse from caregivers in nursing homes. It makes you feel mighty as a trainer, doesn’t it?

Training is often the justification for doing something controversial.
"Training purposes" justify no respect for the privacy of your call to a customer service center as "your phone call may be recorded". "Poor training, supervision" justifies the acquittal of officials on trial in brutality cases. Lately I‘ve ever heard that the reason for the war in Iraq was to "bring effective training to the Iraqi". A workshop would have been obviously cheaper!

The lesson learned here is that you need to be careful with training: you are dealing with work that is highly controversial, highly visible and often not fully understood.
In fact unreasonable expectations, lack of accountability or clear definition of boundaries of training responsibilities can kill the best training work before it even starts.

What can you do to prevent or limit all this from happening in your training initiative?
How can we design training and play it "safer"?