From Insight to Impact | Part 1 of 5

Learning leaders are challenging the idea that more training leads to better performance. Here’s what they’re saying about the shift from delivering content to driving measurable business outcomes.

We’ve Gotten Good at Delivering Learning. But Is It Working?

Organizations have never had more ways to create, distribute, and consume learning. Content libraries are deep, platforms are polished, and almost any topic is a quick search away. By volume alone, L&D teams are delivering more than ever.

And yet access to content and completion of a course don’t necessarily translate into better performance. A team can hit every completion target and still see little change in how work actually gets done.

That tension surfaced again and again in Season 3 of NovoEdTalks, our conversations with learning and talent leaders. The industries and roles were different, but the question underneath was the same: Are we focusing too much on what L&D delivers and not enough on what learners can actually do?

Alex Kinney of Octapharma USA put it plainly when he talked about moving beyond the “training factory,” where success is measured by how much gets produced, and toward becoming a genuine strategic partner to the business. It’s a useful place to start, because it asks L&D to change the scoreboard, not just the output.

Watch NovoEdTalks Podcast Episode 106, “Beyond the Training Factory,” with Alex Kinney

The First Question Shouldn’t Be “What Training Do We Need?”

When a request for training lands on an L&D team’s desk, the instinct is to start building. But the more valuable first move is to ask whether training is the right answer at all.

Sonya Overstreet of Leadec made the case that learning and development is ultimately about performance improvement, not training for its own sake. Sometimes the gap is knowledge or skill. Just as often, it’s something training can’t fix: goals that were never clearly stated, expectations that differ from one manager to the next, or a process that makes the right behavior harder than the wrong one.

Watch NovoEdTalks Podcast Episode 101, “Training that Moves the Business Forward,” with Sonya Overstreet

Octapharma USA’s Kinney described seeing this firsthand in his organization. What looks like a training problem on the surface can often turn out to be a process issue, a technology barrier, or a management obstacle. Build the course anyway, and you’ve spent time and budget solving a problem that was never there, while the real one stays put.

This is where L&D earns its seat at the table. A team that helps the business name the actual problem and then recommends the right intervention (which is sometimes training and sometimes isn’t), is operating as a partner rather than an order-taker. The goal isn’t to deliver more training. It’s to solve the right problems.

Completion Isn’t the Same as Capability

Completion rates, participation numbers, and satisfaction scores all have their place. They tell us something real about the learning experience: whether people showed up, whether the content was accessible, whether it felt worthwhile.

What these metrics can’t tell us is whether someone can now do something they couldn’t do before.

David Posluszny of Air Products framed the ultimate goal of learning as behavior change: the kind that improves how employees perform and contributes to business objectives. A course that ends at a certificate hasn’t reached that goal yet. It’s reached the starting line.

Watch NovoEdTalks Podcast Episode 100, “Beyond Completion Rates,” with David Posluszny

Audrey Witters of Learning Impact Advisors pointed to where many programs fall short. We present information, but we don’t offer enough structured opportunities for people to do anything with it. Knowledge gets delivered, then learners return to their day jobs and are left to figure out application on their own. That’s the gap between a one-and-done course and a learning journey, and it’s where most of the potential value quietly disappears.

Watch NovoEdTalks Podcast Episode 102, “The Learning Journey,” with Audrey Witters

Closing that gap means building in room to practice, apply, and demonstrate new capabilities, not just consume them. Completing training and developing capability are two different things.

What If the Learning Experience Looked More Like the Work Itself?

This is the question NovoEd’s Chief Learning Strategist Todd Moran takes on in the video below. His starting point is the end: Before designing anything, define the performance outcomes you want a population of learners to achieve, and ask what it would take to get there. Sometimes, as he notes, a course isn’t the answer at all.

When it is, Todd pushes the idea further. Can the learning itself be the work? Rather than representing the job through slides and scenarios, the learning design can have people produce work products that mirror what they’ll actually be asked to do on the job.

Moran’s reasoning is simple. A demonstrable work product is evidence of behavior change, and behavior change is what translates into performance, which is the thing the business cares about. As he put itIn his succinct observation, “I don’t care so much about the completion piece.” What he looks for instead is application, collaboration, feedback, and reflection, along with the element he calls out as most central to NovoEd’s approach: practice.

Each of those elements does distinct work:

• Application puts new knowledge to use on a real task.
• Collaboration exposes learners to other perspectives and lets them learn from peers who face similar challenges.
• Feedback shows people where they stand and what to adjust.
• Reflection pushes learners to think about what they’re consuming and how it applies to their own role.
• Practice builds the repetition and confidence that make a new behavior stick.

Brandon Springle of Shaw Industries touched on the same idea from a different angle, describing learning that exists for application and acceleration rather than for its own sake. The point isn’t to learn more. It’s to be more capable, sooner, in the roles people actually hold.

Watch NovoEdTalks Podcast Episode 104, ”Leading with Care and Challenge,” with Brandon Springle

Showing What Changed: From Activity Metrics to Business Results

The pressure on L&D to demonstrate business impact isn’t going away, and it’s easier to meet when the connection is designed in from the start rather than reconstructed afterward.

If the goal is improved performance, learning leaders need to define what that improvement looks like before building the experience. That means identifying the specific behaviors that need to change, connecting those behaviors to business objectives, and deciding in advance how progress will be measured.

Consider the difference. One team starts with the content: “We need a course on difficult conversations.” Another starts with the outcome: “We want managers to address performance issues earlier, so fewer small problems become turnover.” The second team has a clear picture of what success looks like, which tells it what to build, what to practice, and what to measure.

Christopher Chappell of Weis Markets emphasized the importance of L&D delivering real value to the business, a theme that runs through everything above. When learning leaders can show a line from the learning experience to a changed behavior to a business result, the conversation about L&D’s role changes.

Watch NovoEdTalks Podcast Episode 97, “The Future of Work Requires ‘Meta Skills’,” with Christopher Chappell

David Posluszny’s point about behavior change returns here as the connecting thread: What employees do differently is what ties learning to business objectives. Design backward from the performance improvement the organization needs, rather than forward from the content it wants to deliver.

From Insight to Impact: What L&D Leaders Can Do Differently

The conversations in this article point toward a handful of questions worth bringing to your next planning session:

1. Start with the problem. What specific performance challenge are we trying to solve, and is training actually the right solution?
2. Define success differently. What should people be able to do differently as a result of this learning experience?
3. Make learning actionable. Where can we create opportunities for practice, collaboration, feedback, and reflection?
4. Connect learning to real work. Can the learning experience itself produce meaningful work products or evidence of new capabilities?
5. Measure what matters. How will we know whether learning has translated into improved performance?

You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Pick one program that’s due for a refresh and run it through these questions. The answers will tell you a lot about where your learning is doing its job and where it’s only delivering content. The value of learning isn’t simply what people complete. It’s what they’re able to do with what they’ve learned.

What’s Next?

These questions are just one piece of a bigger conversation.

Across our From Insight to Impact series, we’re exploring five themes shaping learning and development, bringing together perspectives from NovoEdTalks guests and Chief Learning Strategist Todd Moran to help learning leaders translate industry insights into meaningful action. Stay tuned for Theme 2.