An overworked friend recently warned her boss that her team was burning out. In response, HR sent them all on a mindfulness course. This only increased the backlog of work when they returned to their desks. “What I actually need,” she said, “is more staff”.

Training has become the panacea for every corporate ill, the default answer to improving productivity, retaining talent, and even taming the wage-price spiral. But it increasingly feels like a substitute for good management. I keep meeting people who are being forced to attend workshops which aren’t relevant to their job, or seem like virtue-signalling. As one weary charity worker said to me, “we always have to say the course was wonderful, or we get treated like s**t”.

Some lacklustre training is part of modern life. We’ve all clicked through falsely jolly compliance videos while scrolling on our phones or been lectured by a well-meaning person about, basically, being kind. But as the world spends more and more on “l(fā)earning and development” — $370bn in 2019 — I have found it surprisingly hard to discover what actually works.