Here’s a revolutionary idea to deliver an excellent hospitality experience with a lean, efficient operation: let’s just not train anyone. Ever. In fact, let’s go further and drop the whole charade of formal education altogether. Primary, secondary, tertiary—pull the plug on the lot. Let’s just sit the staff in a dark room with a high-speed connection and wait for knowledge to arrive via osmosis.
Based on the intellectual development of our species to date, this strikes me as highly misguided bullshit with absolutely no foundation in reality. In a sane world, it should be criminal. What makes this even more galling is that these proffered brain expletives are often coming from people who are themselves apparently educated and, theoretically, responsible for educating others professionally. If this is the “wisdom” being dispensed from on high, then it’s high time we cleansed the faculty ranks, methinks.
I am well and truly sick and tired of those who possess zero depth in business complexity or process grandstanding on a platform that suggests enterprise hospitality is “just like Instagram.” The narrative is always the same: why would anyone need help when the tech is so intuitive? It’s a dangerously naive fantasy peddled by people who’ve clearly never had to wrestle with the actual deployment of global brand toolsets or the structural reality of complex business processes.
Osmosis is a scientific process for moving water, not for building a professional intellect. Education isn’t just about facts; it’s about learning how to troubleshoot and understanding the “why” behind the “how.” Without it, you aren’t an expert; you’re just a highly-functioning parrot repeating the last thing you saw on a social feed.
If you want the cold, hard reality of what happens when you actually invest, the empirical data tells a story the “osmosis” crowd chooses to ignore. Rigorous workplace training delivers a Return on Investment ranging from 91% to a staggering 400%. That’s not a rounding error; that’s the margin between a thriving, profitable business and a chaotic mess.
When we stop teaching, we stop growing. We end up with a workforce that can follow a prompt but can’t solve a problem. We’re trading a 400% ROI for a “simplified” operation that eventually collapses under the weight of its own ignorance. It’s high time we stopped pretending that intuition is a substitute for an educated mind.
Life is so tech. But intelligence still requires an upgrade you can’t just download.
Mark Fancourt
