The Training was Correct
The system was not
A line worker at an electric utility cooperative was killed by a hornet swarm during substation maintenance. The OSHA investigation produced a public record of what the system around him did to make that the morning he died: a routine inspection in late August heat, an emergency response measured in twenty minutes, equipment staged too far away, time pressure that made the safe choice the slow choice. A training piece built from that record — names and locations fictionalized, investigation findings intact—sat on a shared drive and was never assigned.
The decision didn’t come down to a confrontation. It just settled. The Safety Director had recently been let go—a habit of not reading or responding to email, and the org finally moved on it. His portfolio, including safety training, folded into the Compliance Director’s responsibilities. The Compliance Director, suddenly owning a program he hadn’t designed, defaulted to what he knew: a PowerPoint deck for in-person delivery. The HR Director liked my idea. But…the org had just elevated the Compliance Director into the safety role. The political moment for overruling him on his first major delivery was not now. The file sat on a shared drive.
I’m not the first instructional designer to watch a piece of work die that way. The pattern repeats across industries and org sizes, regardless of who’s in the room: the system that should have used the work rejected it—not because anyone present was wrong, but because the structure made the conventional choice the safest one anyone could make. That is exactly the kind of failure this publication is about.
So I’m publishing it openly. No one can put it back in the drawer.
What the publication does
The piece is called The Swarm. It walks through Mike Stevens’s last morning at Heartland Electric Cooperative. Names and locations are fictionalized, but the investigation findings are real. Mike’s decisions are real. The system failures that shaped them are real.
What makes it different from a stock SCORM module isn’t production value. It’s the framing. Mike isn’t the cautionary fool who should have known better. He’s a twenty-year veteran making a defensible call inside a set of constraints his employer was responsible for shaping. The training doesn’t ask the learner to spot Mike’s mistake. It asks the learner to weigh the same trade-offs Mike weighed, before they know how it ends. Then it names what the system did to make those the only trade-offs available.
That posture has names in safety science: Just Culture, Safety-II—the framework that says human error is rarely the actual cause of adverse outcomes. The systems around human decisions are. The training discipline most workplaces buy hasn’t caught up. Most compliance training still treats the worker as the locus of failure and the organization as the disappointed parent. The certified module, the signed acknowledgment, the quiz score that proves the workforce was told—one of that is training. It’s documentation. It’s liability theater.
Trainable is the publication that makes the alternative argument, one case at a time, in the documented detail the public record provides.
The cases will come from across high-hazard sectors: cybersecurity, financial services, healthcare, education, retail, government, energy. They share a shape. A worker, trained in good faith to do something a regulator or employer instructed her to do. A worker who did it. A system around the training that betrayed the instruction, made it inoperative, or punished her for following it. A record of who lost what.
The records exist. OSHA investigation files. SEC disclosures. CSRB reports. DOJ filings. NTSB and CSB accident reports. Congressional testimony. The public infrastructure of incident documentation in the United States is enormous. It is almost entirely unused in training design.
Trainable‘s method is to take a single incident, anchor it in the public record, and tell the story closely enough that the reader feels the moment the trained behavior met the broken system. Then the structural claim—about what the system was, what it asked of the worker, and what it did to the worker—sits in plain view of the case that proved it.
What it doesn’t do
A note on what this publication does not do. It does not pretend that the politics of how training gets bought and sold are absent from the failures we examine. The cases will name budgets, procurement timelines, regulatory capture, and incentive structures where they’re load-bearing to the failure. The argument is structural; the structure includes who pays for what.
Trainable writes for the senior L&D practitioner who already knows the field is not delivering what it claims—who is tired of training that exists to document compliance rather than change behavior, and who can recognize a system-failure argument when one is made carefully.
The running argument
The running argument fits in one sentence:
Asking training to trump culture wastes everyone’s time.
The implication: training is a small intervention in a large system. The system around the training determines whether the training can do what it says it does. When it can’t — when the incentives contradict the training, when the reporting channel punishes the reporter, when the procedure hasn’t been updated for the threat — the cost of that gap does not fall on the design team. It falls on the workers who did exactly what they were taught and lost anyway.
The Swarm is the first case. There will be others.
The publication doesn’t charge for access. The work is openly published because the argument is not a product. It is a record of what training design looks like when the cost of system failure is taken seriously.
If you’ve ever built a training that the system around you made inoperative — or completed a certification while knowing it was theater — Trainable is writing in the direction of what you’ve already noticed. Subscribe if you want to know when the next case lands.