October 22, 2025

Why training alone is never the solution to ableist behavior

There is a three-party storyline that frequently appears in social media:

1. Disabled person goes to a retail outlet (or school, hospital, restaurant, church or any other place of public accommodation).

2. Someone at this location treats the disabled person horribly.

3. The public cries out “more training!” as the solution to the staff member’s behavior.

This never literally never works, and this article will explain why.

People love training as solutions. It’s relatively cheap, usually not terribly time consuming, easy to schedule, and even easier to report outcomes when you use a half way decent Learning Management System (LMS). Staff can sit for an hour, click through slides, sign a form, and leadership can claim progress.

Here’s the problem: nothing in that loop creates durable inclusion. It creates attendance. That is not the same thing as motivation.

A company I once worked for had a issue with tailgating, the term for people sneaking in behind other employees when the second person didn’t have a badge. Every year, we went through the same tailgating training, and every year, the situation failed to improve improve. It wasn’t until word got around that cameras had been installed and security was having stern conversations with people who allowed the tailgating with threats of reports to the person’s VP if it happened again. Shocker, there was a marked improvement.

Training transfers instructions, not motivation to change bad behavior. People can repeat words about disability inclusion in class, pass a quiz with a score of 100 %, and then go back to work and do something completely contrary to the training the same afternoon. People do things they think benefits them. When the watcher leaves or the incentive ends, the “doing” stops. That pattern is not surprising. It is exactly how human beings react when the cost of caring is effort, and the cost of not caring is zero.

Compliance that is maintained only by outside pressure collapses as soon as the pressure goes away. In a way, that makes it a little bit like addiction. The chances of getting clean are much higher when the person with the addiction is motivated to change themselves by going to rehab, not when that person’s parents send them to rehab. Training by itself is pressure without teeth. People pass the quiz and return to their original discriminatory behavior almost immediately. Changing behavior is work; sometimes hard work because the first thing change requires is acknowledging the way you had previously been acting was wrong. When nothing in the job changes, there is no motivation to change behavior.

Employees rarely have enough time to get everything on their work “to do” list done. There is never enough staff. Something always falls to the bottom of the list. The things that fall off the list are the things that do not carry consequences when they don’t get successfully accomplished. Disability inclusion sits in that category when leaders treat it as a trainable ethic instead of a governed requirement. In business, the moral ground is rarely the most defensible ground . If inclusion must compete with all other product team activities and does not come with an incentive or penalty, inclusion will lose every time.

Executives and boards already understand this logic in every other regulated space. No company treats payroll, safety, finance controls, or security as “do it if you have time.” Those areas hold real financial power because failure produces a cost that cannot be easily absorbed.

Middle management feels that reality harder than anyone. They triage the backlog. They make sure the metrics their bosses measure get accomplished. They will not assign effort to inclusion if it carries no reward or penalty. That is not the same as being malicious towards people. It is predictable business math inside a system lacking alignment. Leaders who want disability inclusion to stick have to fix the equation. Inclusion becomes durable when it comes attach with money, risk, and promotion consequences.

1. make accessibility part of performance reviews

2. make hiring goals for people with disabilities part of procurement analysis

3. withhold sign-off on product release when critical accessibility bugs are still present

4. add bonus points to scores for good accessibility as part of hackathons

Do not make the accommodations/inclusion teams beg. Change the cost of ignoring disability inclusion, or add a benefit to doing it right. Provide the training WITH that change. It’s that simple, Without that shift, training is purely cosmetic. It produces people who know the right vocabulary, can pass the test, and still make choices that exclude or offend disabled customers. Then leaders act surprised when things regress. However, it is entirely predictable because it is the direct output of a system that didn’t change incentives or add penalties.

When disability inclusion is optional, exclusion is the outcome. Not because people hate disabled people but because they are overwhelmed and they drop whatever carries the lowest cost to drop. If leaders want people to care they must alter what it costs not to care. Nothing short of that produces behavior that survives stress.

That is the core problem. Not ignorance. Not bad intent. Not a missing deck or a quiz that was too short. The problem is that systems that don’t support accessibility or inclusion let these activities fail with no consequence.

Until leaders change the employee motivation equation, every training cycle ends the same way, like a balloon in wind, drifting away and out of sight the moment the hand holding it lets go.