Roger Schank has a four-word explanation of what’s wrong with training: “It’s just like school.” School clings to vestiges of a bygone era: Students get the summer off to help bring in the crops. Schools are literally an alternate reality, walled off from the real world to protect their “customers” (aka students), thereby guaranteeing that schools remain “out of it.” Teachers coerce pupils to learn rather than motivate them to learn. New graduates find out about the unspoken hoax: Outside of schools, grades are meaningless. Teachers are the font of all the right answers—hardly a stance for developing critical thinking. In the workplace, teamwork is esteemed; in school, learning with others is called cheating.

Training has adopted most of this bad baggage from school. After all, every trainer was brainwashed for a dozen or more years that this is how you learn. An example: Most executives don’t realize that there’s more to leading learning than gut feel. Trainers can fall into the same trap. A training director told his sales trainers that henceforth their bonuses would be calculated as a percentage of their former trainees’ sales. “But we’re not responsible for that,” they complained. Hello?

Suspend judgment, and go with Sharon and me for a moment. How do people learn? What comes naturally? They discover things. They experiment to see what works. They watch others and mimic them. They converse with their colleagues. They find out what they need to know to get things done. They follow their hearts.

It’s time to break the schooling myth and begin doing what it takes to foster learning. It’s time to

This book offers a four-step model for engaging learners, and backs it up with sixty-five specific interventions. It’s like a good cookbook. But a good cookbook does not make a good cook. The recipes are here, but they are just the starting point. Every cook tweaks the instructions to get the best from local ingredients. Every trainer will put his or her spin on things; that’s what a professional does.

Here’s an oversimplification of Sharon’s meta-recipe:

Hans Monderman is a Dutch traffic engineer who is gaining fame for what he doesn’t do. He’s also famous for what he doesn’t like: traffic signs. Remove the center line from a country lane, and people drive more safely. Clutter a road with signs and barriers, and people feel sufficiently protected to drive as fast as they like. If you treat people like fools, they act like fools. Take off the training wheels, and they drive like grown-ups. When Monderman’s changes sink in, traffic accidents drop 30 percent.

Follow Sharon’s advice. Take off the training wheels and entrust people with their own learning. Keep them engaged. You won’t lower the traffic accident rate, but I guarantee you’ll improve the quality of their learning.