Enter The Regressor

ENTER THE REGRESSOR Keeping your learning safe, cheap, tick-box friendly… and boring.

Welcome to the first demon-slaying series on Hell and D. If you’ve explored the site (and I hope you have, otherwise all this talk of demons is going to be weird), you’ll know that we’re helping our hero, Dee, battle against ancient dark forces that exist to undermine learning. Got it? 

Each month, I’ll take on the role of chief Torchbearer, delivering L&D wisdom - along with a trusty team of contributors from across the L&D universe - to keep Dee’s flaming Torch of Knowledge alight, so she can slay some baddies (seriously? Keep up).  I’ll be identifying an L&D demon - a gremlin in the system that wants to wreak havoc in our industry - and figuring out how we can fight back.

This month, I’m taking a look at how we combat the Regressor - an insidious imp who whispers in the ears of your key stakeholders and convinces them to keep their learning programmes as pedestrian as possible. Whether it’s telling your finance department that gamification is a waste of money, or employing distractions such as diversity washing to hide poor learning design, the Regressor is a threat to our L&D calling.

So let’s kick off with a spicy take on my own area of expertise: Most people hate e-learning.

If you questioned your audience and asked them if they’d rather spend 45 minutes on an online "Fire Safety" module or have a root canal without anesthesia, you’d be surprised how many people would start looking up local dentists.

As a guy who writes and designs online courses, I’m sort of shooting myself in the foot when I ask: Do we actually still need e-learning? But sometimes it feels like we’re an industry that hates innovation, keeping a digital corpse on life support, delivering cheap, nasty, dull content, all because HR needs an arse-covering tick in a box, for the lowest price available. And if that’s the case, I might as well go fulfill my ambitions of becoming a forest ranger and just hand the learning keys over to AI.But that’s what the Regressor demon wants…

A Brief History of Digital Purgatory

As with all good monster hunting quests, to understand where we’re going, we have to look at where we’ve been.

The "Click-Next" Age

In the beginning, there was the slideshow. You watched a piece-to-camera video of a person in a suit, speaking in a fake enthusiastic tone over cheerful corporate background music. Then you clicked "Next" fourteen times, answered an insultingly easy multiple-choice question, and were rewarded with a bland PDF certificate for your HR Manager to file away under “Dismissal Ammunition”. If you were lucky, the videos could be skipped through, otherwise you had to watch the playbar advance in time with your life force depleting.

The Great Lie

Then came the mid-2010s. We were promised a revolution. We were told e-learning would become an immersive, 360°, VR/AR extravaganza. The industry went all-in on the hype - according to Mordor Intelligence, (yes, I managed to find a LOTR-monikered source) the global gamification market is projected to skyrocket from $11.9 billion in 2021 to nearly $112 billion by 2031. Although they do include DuoLingo in those figures, and your mileage may vary on whether that’s really gamified learning, or a clever paid subscription model. 

I bought a Metaquest headset, thinking that all my future courses would be delivered in VR. "Gamification" was talked about at every conference until the word lost all meaning. But despite 70% of Global 2000 companies incorporating some form of play, the holy grail of KPIs - engagement - is still a fantasy. Gallup reports that a staggering 85% of employees still feel "disengaged" at work. It’s like I bought a career path from TEMU - it looked great in the pictures but I wasted all my money on a padded Jiffy bag filled with empty promises. What happened?

The 2026 Reality

I create learning for a living. But I’m also a learner and an employee, who has too much actual work on my Trello board to be enthusiastic about undertaking any e-learning that gets shovelled my way. It could just be me (though I doubt it), but the modern learner doesn't want a "journey." They want an answer. If they need to fix a pivot table in Excel, they don't want a 20-minute module; they want a 60-second YouTube short.

And this aligns perfectly with the needs of HR departments - squeezed by shrinking budgets and mandated by MDs and CFOs to get non-revenue-generating tasks done quickly - that are searching for the training path of least resistance. Why spend £50k on a gamified masterpiece when a £500 "click-next" course gets the same compliance tick for the audit?

Gaming the numbers

So, is gamification dead? Not if you listen to those figures from Silicon Valley. But in the (admittedly anecdotal) experience of a learning designer in the trenches like me, whose clientele is B2B, it’s definitely hooked up to a ventilator, waiting for a miracle.

There’s clearly a disconnect between gamification tech being implemented across organisations with money to burn  - McDonald’s UK reported that their gamified till-training programme had generated £23.7 million in additional revenue across 1,300 restaurants - and organisations lower down the profit scale who can’t, or won’t, splurge the cash on similar learning programmes. 

Which means that if the majority of employees and learners across small to medium organisations aren’t being offered an awesome gamified learning experience, it’s no surprise the narrative is that e-learning sucks, and could account for our 85% disengagement figure.

Yet data from TalentLMS shows that 89% of employees believe they’d be more productive if their work was more gamified. Hang on a minute, surely there’s something in that…

The tragedy is that human beings are hardwired for play. We learn through play from the moment we’re born. Given the choice, I would play all day rather than work. The reason it hasn't taken off, and the reason organisations aren’t implementing it, isn't the tech. It’s apathy. It’s the "if it ain’t broke, why fix it?" attitude of leadership teams and their penny-pinching attitude to training.

In an oft-touted quote from a 2012 Gartner article "Gartner predicts that by 2014, 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives primarily due to poor design." (Brian Burke, Gartner, 2012). Or in real terms, they fail because the designers were forced to produce boring compliance training with a leaderboard taped to the front and call it gamification.

So, as L&D professionals that want to create engaging learning experiences that see learners actually learn, what can we do? It’s all about changing hearts, minds and ROI predictions - not just - as in my case - as a means to create more gamified learning experiences, but to address the overall lack of interest in creating meaningful learning across L&D in general.

Enter the Regressor

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be looking at particular areas where our Regressor demon likes to strike, convincing your stakeholders to play it safe, to cut the budget, and to remove the "interactive bits" because they’re "too risky."

The Regressor’s primary goal is to keep things safe, cheap, and "tick-box" friendly. Why? Because innovation requires deep thought, actual change, and the courage to fail. The Regressor hates all three. It wants you to stay in the comfort zone of mediocrity where nobody gets challenged and nothing actually improves.

Along with our rookie demon-hunter Dee, we are going to study the Regressor, and investigate the specific ways it sabotages your learning - from employing an army of “Shadow Stakeholders" to unleashing the dreaded "Tina Protocol" - and how you can fight back to build something your audience will actually want to use, and more importantly, learn from.

Grab your flaming laser pointer and your holy water. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Mark Gash is a creative content lead for elearning, who believes there has to be more to training content than just clicking a next button.
Connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markgash