Then we are in total agreement. In fact, it's hard to see anybody disagreeing with the idea of improving an organisation's ability to manage change and leverage the expertise of its members.

And I think the idea of creating "challenges for organizations to help them learn" is the right one - it's exactly what I've been doing for the last few years :)

But I've never made any headway when calling it 'training'. I've never managed to persuade an organisation to do 'collective training' but I have project managed 'business development'/'service development'/'innovation' programmes.

I like Gilbert's idea of the Black Box. It reminds me of the idea of a barium meal - feed some new skills/information to an organisation and record how fast and with what fidelity the signal reaches the bowels of the organisation...

Which I suppose is where I struggle with the word 'training' - or, more accurately, my clients do. (Training has long been a term of art for me.)

Training = input = measurable improvement in ability against target. This we're talking about here is utterly different in terms of metrics. Training the organisation ~= development ~= increased responsiveness (with any 'target' likely to have unintended consequences).