Several years ago, I was in a World Health Organization country office, preparing to deliver a Learning Learning to Transform Training workshop. As is customary, I made a courtesy visit to the WHO Representative.

With my counterpart from the country office, we walked into his office and headed instinctively toward the empty chairs in front of his desk. He stood up, stopped us, and asked us to move to a standing table instead, where he joined us.

After introductions, he asked what I was there to do.

“I’m here to deliver a training,” I said, “a training of trainers.”

He paused, looked at me, and said, “Well, good luck with that.”

Sensing his dissatisfaction, I asked whether he was not optimistic about the initiative.

“No,” he said, “I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic. I’ve just never seen it work in practice.”

At the time, I tried to explain that ours was different. I am not sure how convincing I was in that moment. Looking back, though, I think he was right to be skeptical. Much of what passes for “training of trainers” does not work, not because the people involved lack intelligence or commitment, but because the term itself has quietly come to mean something else.

If we take the phrase training of trainers seriously, it should mean helping people develop the skills, knowledge, confidence, and judgment required to train others well.

Unfortunately, in many settings, it has come to mean something closer to cascade training or replication.

The typical scenario looks like this: the designers of a training bring together a group of participants and walk them through a workshop the designers themselves have created. They show the slides. They explain the agenda. They describe the activities. Sometimes they demonstrate a technique. Questions are allowed, time permitting.

At the end, participants are expected to go forth and deliver the same training, faithfully, to others.

That is not a training of trainers.

That is an orientation of replicators.

Replication is not facilitation. Orientation is not training.

What is missing in this model is the very thing that makes training effective: an understanding of how adults learn and the ability to work with that learning in real time.

Trainers are not merely conduits for content. They are hosts of a learning process, one that is shaped by group dynamics, context, emotion, power, and prior experience.

Our work with trainers and educators takes a different approach. Rather than training people to reproduce a specific workshop, we focus on helping them explore what it means to learn as adults and how that learning can be supported or undermined in training settings.

Participants spend time examining how learning happens. They practice facilitation, rather than watching it. They explore verbal and nonverbal communication as lived experience. They work with small groups, large groups, and open discussions, learning not just what to do, but when and why. They experience participatory methods as learners before being asked to use them as facilitators.

In other words, the emphasis is on developing judgment, not scripts.

This distinction matters. Institutions often gravitate toward replication because it feels efficient, controllable, and scalable. But learning is not a product that can be copied and distributed unchanged. It is a process that unfolds between people, shaped by context and pace. Trainers who have only been oriented to a package are left unprepared when reality inevitably diverges from the plan.

True training of trainers is slower, less predictable, and harder to measure, but it builds capacity that lasts beyond a single workshop or curriculum. It equips people not just to deliver content, but to work skillfully with learning itself.

When I think back to that conversation at the standing table, I no longer hear it as doubt directed at our work. I hear it as a challenge, one that many training programs still need to answer. If training of trainers is to mean anything, it must be about more than faithful reproduction. It must be about helping people become trainers in the fullest sense of the word.