You know the feeling. You’ve got knowledge that matters. Your team needs it. You’ve been meaning to get it out there for months, maybe longer. And every time you sit down to think about it seriously, the scope balloons. Bespoke training programs. Custom materials. Dedicated time. Organizational context woven through every module. And suddenly it feels like too much. So it gets pushed to next quarter. Then next year. And it stays there.
This isn’t about laziness or lack of desire. It’s not even about perfectionism, really. It’s about friction. The effort required to bridge the gap between what you could deliver, generic and standardized training that doesn’t speak your language, and what you think you should deliver, perfectly customized and contextually rich and organizationally specific, has become so high that doing nothing feels easier than doing something.
And that’s a systems problem, not a motivation problem.
Naming the Gap
There’s a particular kind of stagnation that happens in organizations around training and knowledge dissemination. It’s different from other forms of procrastination because it carries a weight of recognition. You know the training matters. You know your team would benefit. You might even have the content sitting somewhere, policy documents, operational guides, best practices you’ve learned the hard way. But the gap between “we have this knowledge” and “our team has learned this knowledge in a way that sticks” feels impossibly wide.
The traditional options feel binary. On one side, you can use standardized training materials from an external provider, security training, diversity training, compliance frameworks. These are professionally designed, they cover the principles, they’re relatively low-effort to deploy. But they don’t speak your language. They don’t recognize your nuances. They’re generic by design, which means they’re also generic in impact. On the other side, you can build bespoke training, custom materials tailored to your organization, your culture, your specific context. This would be better, theoretically. But it requires time, expertise, resources you don’t have. So it stays in the “someday” pile.
What’s interesting is that this isn’t really a knowledge problem. You know what training you need. It’s not a motivation problem, you genuinely want to do it. It’s a friction problem. The overhead of moving from intention to execution is so high that the barrier becomes insurmountable, particularly in resource-constrained environments where every hour counts.
This is where most organizations get stuck. Not because they don’t care. Not because they’re not trying. But because the effort required to create something that feels “good enough” to put your name on it is perceived as too great. And so the knowledge stays locked away, and the training never happens.
The False Binary
The assumption that’s been driving this stagnation is that training is either standardized or bespoke, generic or custom, low-effort or high-quality. But that binary isn’t actually true, and recognizing that is where things start to shift.
Consider how health and safety training has evolved. For decades, organizations have deployed standardized H&S videos and materials. These follow universal principles, they’re based on regulations, best practices, proven frameworks. And they work. Millions of people have learned basic safety principles from generic training materials. The principles are sound. They apply across contexts.
But here’s what’s also true: after a while, standardized training becomes so commoditized that it loses meaning. It becomes something people sit through rather than something they engage with. It doesn’t speak to their circumstances, their risks, their language. So the question becomes: is the problem that standardized training is inherently insufficient, or is the problem that we’ve swung too far in that direction?
The answer is probably both. Completely generic training is too generic. But completely bespoke training is too expensive and too slow. What’s actually needed is something in the middle.
The Middle Ground
There’s a sweet spot between “generic training that doesn’t speak to us” and “perfectly customized training that takes six months to build.” It’s the space where you take universal principles, the things that are true across contexts, and you give them your organizational voice and context, without the burden of building everything from scratch.
This is where the friction actually drops. You’re not starting from zero. You’re starting with proven frameworks, established principles, materials that already exist. But you’re curating them. You’re adding your context. You’re making them speak your language. And critically, you’re doing this without needing a team of instructional designers or months of development time.
The principles of security training are universal. The principles of diversity and cultural awareness are universal. The principles of operational knowledge are universal. What changes is the application, how you talk about it, what examples you use, what resonates with your specific team. And that’s a very different task than building training from scratch.
The Permission Piece
Here’s what I’ve realized, particularly in my own work: the anxiety about needing everything to be bespoke is often misplaced. We’ve been told that customization is always better, that generic is always worse. But that’s not actually true. Universal principles are sufficient as a foundation. They’re not perfect, but they’re sufficient. And sufficient, delivered, is better than perfect, never delivered.
This isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about recognizing that the standard you actually need is different from the standard you’ve been imagining. You don’t need a perfectly tailored training program. You need your team to understand the principles. You need them to see how those principles apply in your context. You need them to have a framework they can reference and build on. That’s achievable without the overhead.
What Changes When Friction Drops
When I was evaluating our email security platform recently, I faced exactly this tension. We could buy access to their platform and run our own phishing campaigns using their generic training materials. Or we could pay for a managed service where they’d handle everything, customize it, optimize it. The first felt like too little. The second felt like too much. What I actually wanted was a middle ground, curated materials that I could confidently say were educating our team in the right principles, without the burden of managing the whole program myself.
We found that middle ground. And it changed what became possible.
The same tension is showing up again in how we approach diversity and cultural awareness training. The desire is there. The recognition is there that it matters. But the execution keeps stalling because the perceived effort is too high. What if we could take curated, universal principles around diversity and cultural awareness, inject our organizational context, and deliver something that’s engaging and meaningful without requiring months of development?
That’s not a theoretical question anymore. Tools exist now that make this possible.
So What Does This Actually Mean?
Recognizing that the friction you’re experiencing isn’t a personal failing or a motivation problem. It’s a systems problem, the overhead of moving from intention to delivery has been too high. And it means understanding that you don’t need to choose between generic and bespoke. There’s a middle ground, and it’s more achievable than you think.
It also means being honest about what training actually needs to be. Does it need to be meticulously planned and perfectly customized? Or does it need to be a good method of getting a general idea across in an engaging, meaningful way? Those are very different questions, and the answer depends on your context. But for most SMEs sitting on knowledge they want to disseminate, the answer is probably the latter.
The real question isn’t “How do we build perfect training?” It’s “How do we get a minimum set of information out there in an engaging way, without the overhead killing the project?” And that’s a question with answers now.
The Knowledge You’re Sitting On Matters
The knowledge you’re sitting on matters. Your team needs it. And the barrier between intention and delivery doesn’t have to be as high as it feels right now. The middle ground exists. It’s not perfect, but it’s real, and it’s achievable.
I’m curious what this looks like in your context. What knowledge are you sitting on? What’s the friction point for you? Is it the perceived effort? The uncertainty about whether a generalized approach is “good enough”? Something else?
I’d genuinely like to hear how this lands for you, and what options you’re considering. Reach out, or drop a comment below. Let’s think through what this might look like for your organization.