ACT III: THE THEATER — Performance vs. reality
-
Someone: Hey, we're going to do a NLP course, what do you think?
-
Me: Bullshit.
-
Someone: Yeah, me too... look who I'm asking.
Any resemblance to my history as a worker is purely coincidental.
The matter of training/development at work is quite a topic, and as I've already explained, I don't consider myself qualified to formulate or cite great theorists as solutions to the situations I describe; nevertheless, I hope the enthusiast who reads my words considers them as the result of critical and reflective analysis of previously experienced situations.
For some reason, workplaces tend to hire or propose training for the development or acquisition of skills such as leadership, NLP, time management, motivation, and any other series of things that, in the best case, would generate in the person receiving the training a series of skills that would "enrich" their work and with luck that of their subordinates, although with a minimal and almost improbable impact on the final product, for which the Customer pays, for which the business exists.
However, it's common to notice among workers the absence or lack of skills and/or tools to perform high-impact tasks for the business/their work.
People who work with thousands of data points and numbers lack training to make calculations with spreadsheets. People who depend on proper management of their email barely know how to reply to an email and don't know tools to manage it in an organized and efficient way (I felt identified). Internet browsing is allowed and fun is shared, and rarely is knowledge of high-impact business tools encouraged. There are more times when upper management sends emails asking for certain results to be improved than times when they assign hours for the study of process improvements.
Among the most interesting things about this is that many times the knowledge of these tools is within the organization, possessed by one person, which means that if it exists, making use of that knowledge to share it within the organization requires nothing more than the allocation of time and space.
I find it difficult if not impossible to explain the reason for this situation.
Not only is knowledge of intangible and rather inert skills overestimated, above all, the knowledge of minimum skills to perform the task is undervalued and the use of common sense is belittled.
The Taleb Connection
There's a name for the people who can lecture on "motivation" but can't set up a mail filter.
"The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game (2018), Prologue
That class — Taleb calls them the IYI, Intellectual Yet Idiot — is the one the training budget keeps rewarding. The leadership course, the NLP workshop, the motivation framework: explainers paid to explain. Meanwhile the people generating the actual results are starving for the practical tools the business runs on, and the knowledge to fix that often already lives inside the building.
Common sense fails because the budget rewards explaining, not understanding.
This article was translated from the 2013 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration — clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.