The farse of quick fixes…
A client called me a while ago. “Vidusha, can you do a half-day on emotional intelligence for my leadership team? They’re a bit poor with people. Maybe a Friday afternoon would work?”
I have heard a version of that sentence a thousand times.
And here is the part that has cost me more business than I’d like to admit: I tell them the truth.
“I can do a half-day,” I say. “It will build awareness. People will leave the room knowing a little more than they walked in with. But let me be clear about one thing — it will not change a single behaviour. Not one. If awareness is what you want, I’m your man. If you want your leaders to actually behave differently on Monday, that is a completely different animal, and it does not happen in an afternoon.”
Some clients lean in at that point.
A fair number simply go and find someone who will happily sell them the afternoon — with results promised.
That, right there, is the whole farce in miniature. And I want to talk about it honestly, because I belong to the industry that runs it.
Just sit with the claims we make, the way you would if a stranger said them to you at a party.
Six coaching sessions will fix a behaviour someone has practised, unconsciously, for thirty years.
One day in a hotel ballroom will turn a manager into a leader.
A set of activities and a generous buffet will make a fractured team collaborate.
A two-hour talk will undo the bias an entire culture spent a lifetime installing.
A certificate — a certificate — means a person now has a skill.
Say those out loud. Slowly. They are not marketing. They are not even optimism. They are, if we are being honest, simply untrue. And the strange thing is, everyone in the transaction knows it. The buyer knows. The seller knows. The participant, somewhere behind the polite nodding, knows best of all.
So the real question is not why don’t these things work. We’ve known that for years.
The real question is: why do we keep buying them — even when someone tells us, to our face, that they won’t work?
It would be lazy to say we’re stupid. We are not. The people commissioning these programmes are some of the sharpest I know. They would never accept “one session” as a fix for a broken supply chain or a leaking balance sheet.
So why here?
Because the lie is useful. That’s the uncomfortable answer.
A half-day is not really a solution to a problem. It is an alibi. It lets an organisation say it did something about collaboration, about inclusion, about leadership, without touching any of the things that would actually have to change — the reporting lines, the incentives, the manager who rewards exactly the behaviour the session was meant to cure, the culture that punishes the very thing the facilitator just spent four hours encouraging.
The intervention is comfortable precisely because it is small. It fits in a calendar slot. It has a clean price. It produces a feedback form with a happy average and a folder of photos of people laughing during an icebreaker. Everyone leaves with something. The buyer has a line item that proves intent. The seller has an invoice. The participant has an afternoon out of the office and a certificate for the wall.
Everyone is served. Except the actual problem, which is sitting exactly where it was on Monday morning, untouched, waiting.
We are not buying solutions. We are buying permission to stop worrying.
Here is the distinction I keep trying to draw, and the one I wish the whole industry would draw with me.
There is awareness, and there is training. They are not the same thing, and pretending they are is where the lying begins.
Awareness is a half-day. It is a talk, a taster, an opening of the eyes. It is genuinely valuable — but its only honest promise is that people will know something they didn’t before. No behaviour change is possible from it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a horizon and calling it a destination.
Training is a different beast entirely. It is structured. It is sequenced. It is interconnected — each part building on the last, reinforced over time, tied to what actually happens back in the workplace. It is uncomfortable and repetitive in the way that anything that genuinely rewires a habit has to be. And because it is built properly, it can be held to account. It produces behaviour change you can see — and yes, return on investment you can measure.
That last word is the one the farce is most afraid of. ROI.
Because the moment you agree to be measured, the half-day cure collapses. You cannot fake a number that someone is going to check in six months. The reason so much of this industry refuses to talk about measurable outcomes is not that the outcomes are hard to measure. It is that, for an afternoon’s “awareness” sold as a solution, there is nothing there to measure in the first place.
And underneath all of it sits a truth the half-day was never going to touch.
The things we promise to fix in a morning — emotional intelligence, collaboration, leadership, inclusion — are not skills sitting in an individual’s head, waiting to be topped up like petrol. They are outcomes of a system. They emerge, or fail to emerge, from how people are structured, how power flows, what gets rewarded, who gets heard, and a thousand tiny daily interactions no facilitator is ever in the room for.
You cannot install collaboration into people who are measured against each other. You cannot train inclusion into a structure designed to keep certain voices small. You cannot coach emotional intelligence into a leader whose own boss models the opposite every single day and gets promoted for it.
These are not deficits. They are outcomes. And you do not fix an outcome by sending the symptom on a course.
It is the difference between a painkiller and a course of physiotherapy. One lets you forget the pain for an afternoon. The other is slow, structured, mildly uncomfortable, and actually changes how you move. Guess which one sells more easily. Guess which one we keep ordering.
So — is it time to call it out? Yes. But not with the satisfying anger of an exposé, because that lets the buyer off too easily. The villain is not simply “the industry.” The villain is our shared appetite for the cheap version — the appetite that hangs up the phone when someone tells you the truth and dials the number of someone who won’t.
If we wanted to end the farce, we would have to start asking harder, less flattering questions. Not “can you do a session on it?” but “what in our system is producing this, and are we willing to change it?” Not “how do we train our people to collaborate?” but “what are we doing that makes collaboration irrational for them?”
Those questions are expensive. They are slow. They implicate the people asking them. They cannot be closed off with a buffet and a feedback form.
Which is exactly why we avoid them — and exactly why they are the only ones worth asking.
I’ll keep getting the Friday-afternoon phone call. And I’ll keep giving the inconvenient answer: I can do the half-day — but call it what it is. It will build awareness. It will not change behaviour. If you want change, that’s structured, it’s interconnected, it takes time, and I’ll let you measure every rupee of it.
Some of them hang up.
The ones who don’t are the only real work I’ve ever done…
Everything teaches. Whether we’re willing to be changed is another matter entirely.
V Over Tea 
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