The New Coke fiasco in the ‘80s shows why L&D keeps repeating the same mistakes. When we design learning for the ‘logical human’, engagement, behaviour change and budgets suffer. Design instead for real people, who are time-poor, emotional and context-driven, will mean you bubble to the top. Matt Furness explores.
In 1985, Coca-Cola did something that looked perfectly reasonable in a spreadsheet, but utterly deranged in real life. Their market share had been slipping for 15 years and Pepsi was swaggering around, winning taste tests with younger drinkers. Coca-Cola, being a serious company staffed by serious adults, concluded it must do something sensible.
The public reaction was swift, emotional, and faintly medieval
On April 23rd, they announced they were replacing their original recipe with a new, sweeter version. The press called it New Coke. Coca-Cola didn’t do this on a whim. They ran blind taste tests with over 200,000 consumers, tweaking the formula in tiny increments until they landed on a version that beat both Pepsi and classic Coke. This change, on paper, was logical and sensible.
Then they released it into the wild.
The public reaction was swift, emotional, and faintly medieval. Thousands wrote furious letters and clogged the phone hotlines with complaints. People started hoarding “proper” Coke like it was a wartime commodity. Some staged public dumpings of New Coke. Others formed protest groups with names that sounded like they were about to storm the Bastille.
Then, just 79 days later, on July 11th, Coca-Cola performed the corporate equivalent of falling to its knees and begging forgiveness. They promised to return to the original recipe. In this moment, Coca-Cola learned a painful lesson: there are two ways of looking at human behaviour.
First, there’s The Logical Human. This is a tidy, managerial fantasy where people accurately report their preferences, make decisions like mini-economists, and reliably choose whatever is “best”. This is the human that Coca-Cola hoped for.
Then there’s The Real Human. According to this view, human behaviour is inconsistent and unpredictable. It’s a lens where context, identity, habit, and social signalling all play a starring role in driving what people do, much more so than logic.
And as Coca-Cola learned, when you design for The Logical Human, you’ll quickly learn The Real Human has a habit of turning up with a baseball bat. It’s about time the L&D industry learned this same lesson.
The L&D problems that refuse to go away
There’s something curious about how L&D’s biggest problems never seem to change. Low engagement. Learning that looks great but makes little meaningful impact on actual behaviour. Budgets that are announced with fanfare one year and “revisited” the next, perhaps after the CFO has had a bad Tuesday. When diagnosing these problems, we often reach instinctively for explanations like:
- “People are too busy to learn”
- “We need more engaging content”
- “Managers don’t role-model learning”
- “The organisation doesn’t really value development”
Often, all these statements are at least somewhat true. This is precisely why they’re so dangerous. These beliefs preserve a comforting story: that our idea was sound and the problems are either minor or they lie downstream. With other people. With managers. With culture. With “the business”. This leads us to make small incremental tweaks to how we design, deliver, and pitch learning. Perhaps we invest in better content, providers, platform, or comms, hoping that’ll fix things. Or we absolve responsibility altogether because it’s not our fault that senior leaders “don’t get it”.
But we must realise that when a problem survives decades of effort, there’s usually a larger conceptual error, a bigger mistake in how we frame the world. That’s what is happening in L&D right now.
Learning teams assume The Logical Human
Picture the average L&D team: They run interviews and surveys to ask people what learning they want. They carefully create and curate content, organising it neatly into their LMS. They use emails, internal campaigns, and slide decks that logically explain why their learning matters. They assume that once people learn what to do in the workshop, and genuinely intend to do it, new behaviour will naturally follow.
Similarly, learning teams assume leaders will support development because it’s the right thing to do for their people. They hope managers will reinforce it because they should.
These ideas are all lovely, but they assume The Logical Human. Let’s now look at The Real Human.
In reality, people are time-poor, deadline-driven, and cognitively overloaded. Their days are chopped into meetings, emails, messages, and minor crises. Attention is fragmented. Energy is rationed. Most decisions are made under pressure, with imperfect information, and a strong bias towards whatever helps them get through today.
Similarly, leaders aren’t calmly weighing up long-term capability investments. They are responding to this quarter, this inbox, this escalation. They will typically opt for what makes them look or feel good over what’s best for the company.
Learning teams conveniently glide past this reality. And when we design for imaginary human beings, we shouldn’t be surprised when our impact is imaginary too.
Learning designed for The Real Human
Once you accept The Real Human, something rather liberating happens. You stop being disappointed in people and start being more demanding of your own approach.
You stop thinking like a content publisher and start thinking like a skilled product designer or marketer. You become suspicious of anything that relies on sustained motivation or heroic levels of self-control. These shifts in mindset alter how you make dozens of everyday decisions. Here are a few examples:
- You recognise that a timely prompt, delivered at the moment of need, will often outperform a three-hour workshop
- You recognise attention follows urgency. So instead of asking learning to compete with work, you design it to show up inside the workflows, decisions, and events people already prioritise
- You recognise people care most about their own lives and the lives of the people they love, not abstract organisational outcomes. So, you frame learning around what they truly care about, and let the business benefits emerge as a consequence
- You recognise demand for learning is revealed through behaviour more than declarations. You analyse what people actually search for, struggle with, and work around, not just what they claim to want in surveys
- You recognise that first-hand experience beats sales messages every time. So instead of telling people how valuable learning will be, you design it to give them a tangible win in the first few seconds
In short, you make practical decisions based on probability, not possibility. For what people are likely to do, not what they could do on a very good day.
What happens when you design for reality
When L&D teams truly accept The Real Human, the effects quickly add up. The first things that improve are learning engagement and adoption. You stop expecting people to search for learning, and instead embed learning into existing routines. Because the learning speaks to things people genuinely care about, from saving time to getting promoted, it feels immediately relevant.
The gap between learning and change lessens too. Instead of hoping that new knowledge or intentions will change behaviour, you design interventions that act on behaviour directly: well-timed prompts, cues at the point of action, and a focus on specific behaviours. Change sticks not because people remember more, but because the right behaviour becomes increasingly effortless or appealing.
Finally, buy-in and investment follow. Not just because your learning is used more or even because it has greater impact, but because you start to appeal to how leaders really make decisions. You appeal to their cravings for ease, status, and pleasure, instead of appealing to duty to do what’s right.
How you can get started
Let me offer two ways to get started. One is a long game that will take months, even years. The other takes seconds.
The long game is this: go big on behavioural science. This isn’t a body of knowledge built on optimism or good intentions. It’s built on observation. It shows how human beings actually behave: automatic, emotional, context-driven, and bounded by time, attention and capacity. If L&D had even half the enthusiasm for applying behavioural science as it does for new technology or content, many of its most problems would start getting solved.
So read the books. Listen to the podcasts. Follow the people who study behaviour for a living. The better you understand how humans really behave, and the more you accept it, the more effective you will become as an L&D professional.
The second move is a single heuristic worth applying to every learning intervention, platform or initiative before you inflict it on your organisation. Simply ask yourself: “Have I designed this for real people – or for how I’d like people to work?”
If the answer is the latter, don’t be surprised when reality responds exactly as it did to New Coke.
Matt Furness is the Founder of Click
