Horizontal Learning: How Peers Change Behavior Where Top-Down Training Can't
Why programs that score well in the classroom fade within months — and the peer-driven alternative: manufacture the felt need first, work real cases, and hand your most experienced skeptics a coaching role.
In the room
- Host
- Jesse Hopps
- Guest
- Vicente Pascual, Global Director of Commercial Excellence, Owens Corning / OCF
- Room
- Moderated by Kurt Friedmann. Participants from BARBRI, DSM-Firmenich, Honeywell, Innova Health, LANXESS, Maersk, Owens Corning, PPG, and Signify
Why sound training fades in months, and what peer-led practice does differently
A global commercial excellence director opens with his own failures — top-down rollouts of an off-the-shelf framework — and walks through the peer-led alternative he built in their place.
Nine companies, anchored by a featured guest who has spent a decade building commercial capability and was willing to start with what went wrong. Participants other than the guest and the moderator are described by role and industry — the session runs under the Chatham House Rule.
The short version
- Top-down, generic training tends to become a tick-the-box exercise: well reviewed in the room, gone within months.
- The work starts by manufacturing a felt need — putting people in front of a real, current problem and letting them struggle with it before handing over any framework.
- The richest insight reliably comes from peers rather than the instructor, which turns participants from consumers into co-owners.
- Give your most experienced skeptics an observer or coach role and they flip from resistant to engaged.
- Learning lasts when it is wired to performance: one to three specific changes, written into a development plan, observed by a leader against a timeframe.
Why traditional training fades
Vicente Pascual traced the approach back to his own early misfires — top-down rollouts, an external consultancy’s off-the-shelf framework, and a mandate to implement it across all operations. The concepts were sound, and management backed them: key account management, customer segmentation, prioritization. What was missing was any time spent meeting each organization where it stood.
- Too little time up front. Little effort went into customizing to the real need, so the program answered problems the organization did not have while leaving the ones it did.
- Almost no coaching afterward. The classroom is the beginning of the work, and without on-the-job coaching people revert to old habits within months.
“We tend to fall into a tick-the-box exercise because we don’t trigger the need and the interest in them.”
Resistance is the default, not the exception
Asked whether this sounded familiar, the room said yes — and the reasons differed by industry.
“Just because you feel like there’s a need as a leader doesn’t mean that they feel a need to change or embrace it. And it’s been very difficult to teach people who don’t want to be taught.”
A commercial excellence leader with a specialty-coatings background named a second kind of resistance: experienced salespeople who believe they already know everything, where long tenure and customer relationships matter as much as capability.
“The level of ownership that each participant needs to take is so much higher and requires so much more effort. Sometimes people come into trainings looking for a short break and relief from the day-to-day job, which exhausts them.”
“If the learning is not directly connected to actions that lead to results, it’s seen as, why am I even bothering? Because this is not going to change my world.”
“Programs miss the outcome piece, and that’s why they become bad training programs.”
That last comment came from a company that trains for a living — and still finds its own internal training boring, and now complicated further by the scramble to fold in AI.
What makes horizontal learning work
- 1
Create the need before you teach
Put people in front of a real, current problem and let them struggle with it. Hand over a framework only after the attempt. Telling a professional who has done the job for thirty years that you are going to teach them how it is done loses them immediately.
- 2
Use real cases, heavily customized
Ideally a problem someone brought into the room that day, rather than a case study written for a different organization.
- 3
Role-play to expose the gap between knowing and doing
The moderator’s formulation: “just because you know something doesn’t mean you can do it; just because you can do something doesn’t mean you will do it.” Role-play is where that gap becomes visible — including to people who dislike doing it.
- 4
Capture the struggle, then debrief it to everyone
Assign observers, take notes, record the exercises if it helps. One group’s breakthrough becomes everyone’s only when somebody captured it and brought it back to the room.
- 5
Give your resisters a role
Most rooms contain learners, vacationers, and prisoners. The last two are often the most experienced people present. Recast them as observers or coaches: it acknowledges their expertise, hands them a purpose, and takes the weight off the trainer to be the only source of insight.
The elite-team analogy
Vicente reframes training as practice for an elite sports team. The best performers train hardest, and they train together — defenders push attackers to get sharper. It acknowledges that participants are already elite, while making clear that even elite performers keep practicing.
The moderator added presence. Plays drawn on a whiteboard win nothing; getting on the field together is where the stakes sit, which is what role-play and live client visits provide.
Making it spread, and making it last
- Tap respected internal performers to teach rather than reaching first for an external trainer. Several participants already run a lunch-and-learn or expert-share version of this.
- Identify your multipliers before you leave, so the practice continues once the trainer is gone. Groups that kept going started applying the techniques on their own — asking a colleague to sharpen a pitch before a meeting, for instance.
- Have leaders coach on real customer visits, observing rather than overshadowing, and guiding back to the framework.
- Tie development to performance. Make getting better an explicit job expectation linked to targets, because the market tends to get harder rather than easier.
Practices to apply immediately
- Manufacture the felt need first. Put people in front of a real, current problem and let them struggle with it before you hand over any framework.
- Use a case someone in the room brought that day, rather than one written for a different organization.
- Give your most experienced skeptics an observer or coach role. It acknowledges their expertise and hands them a purpose.
- Assign someone to capture the moments of struggle and insight, then debrief them to the whole group so one group’s breakthrough becomes everyone’s.
- Tap respected internal performers to teach, and identify your multipliers before the trainer leaves.
- Have leaders coach on real customer visits — observing rather than overshadowing, and guiding back to the framework.
- Close each program with one to three specific commitments per person, written into the development plan and observed by their leader against a timeframe.
Questions the room worked through
- Why does corporate training fail to change behavior?
- Two failure modes came up. Too little time up front customizing to the organization’s actual maturity and needs, so the program answers problems it does not have. And almost no on-the-job coaching afterward, so people revert to old habits within months. The concepts are usually sound — the delivery treats them as a rollout rather than a practice.
- What is horizontal learning?
- A peer-driven, practice-based alternative to top-down instruction. Participants work real cases, role-play them, observe each other, and debrief as a group. The richest insight comes from peers rather than the instructor, which turns each participant from a consumer of training into a co-owner of it.
- How do you get people to want to learn?
- Create the need before you teach. Put them in front of a real, current problem and let them struggle with it, and hand over the framework only after the attempt. Telling a professional with thirty years in the job that you are going to teach them how it is done loses them immediately.
- How do you handle experienced people who think they have nothing left to learn?
- Give them a role. Recast the most experienced skeptics as observers or coaches and ask them to give feedback to their peers. It acknowledges their expertise, hands them a purpose, and takes the weight off the trainer to be the only source of insight in the room.
- Why does role-play work when so many people dislike it?
- It exposes the gap between knowing and doing. As the session’s moderator put it: “just because you know something doesn’t mean you can do it; just because you can do something doesn’t mean you will do it.” Role-play is where that gap becomes visible, including to the people who dread it.
- How do you make learning last after the program ends?
- Wire it to performance. Ask each person to commit to one to three specific changes, align them with their leader, write them into the development plan, and have the leader observe against a defined timeframe. Without that, people revert to the day job.
- Should you use internal experts or external trainers?
- The room leaned internal, or at least both. Respected internal performers already have followership and know the nuances of the job, which is often where the problems sit. The caution raised: a strong performer is not automatically a good trainer — showing what you do is still knowledge transfer, and coaching is what lets someone see themselves in action and adjust.
- How do you spread the practice beyond the training room?
- Identify your multipliers before the trainer leaves. Groups that kept going started applying the techniques on their own, asking a colleague to help sharpen a pitch before a meeting. Leaders extend it by coaching on real customer visits — observing rather than overshadowing, and guiding back to the framework.
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