How to create high impact from learning interventions

By Finn van Hauen, M.Sc. B.com, partner in Scandinavian Training Design

For many years, most organisations have based their business on the assumption that knowledge and people skills are some of the major factors for success. HR departments have accordingly gained more and more importance in corporate lives.

The flip side of this coin is that with importance follows not only resources, but also obligations. Obligations to be able not only to document results, but also to create reliable business processes that lead to business impact.

Documenting the impact from corporate training can be hard to do because it is invariably embedded in a company context, and creating impact from learning is not a simple issue either.

The truth is that most corporate training does not produce the desired business impact. Solid research, by among others, Prof. Robert Brinkerhoff (Western Michigan University) shows that 17 out of 20 participants do not use what they learned in training interventions to improve their job performance.

What does it take then to create High Impact Learning?

Why Does Training Fail?
To create a reliable environment for High Impact Learning one has to ask: why does training fail to produce business impact?

It is not surprising that failure can be due to a number of things – but it might be surprising that mostly the training itself is not the major cause. According to Prof. Brinherhoff, who looked at training interventions that failed to produce impact, more than 80% fail because of factors in the preparation or the follow up of the actual learning event.

The failure of impact causes has led to two major conclusions
Firstly, it appears that the basic challenge is to create a learning process – not just an event - that produces impact from learning.

One major client has a webbased BEST PRACTICE system for business processes. A quick look under the index “learning processes” revealed the text: “To be filled out” – probably not uncommon. Lots of companies operate with Key Performance Processes, but few have up to now included the learning process.

The second major conclusion is that learning cannot be the sole responsibility of the training department, it has to be a process managed by the business leaders. They are the ones who set the goals and objectives for the learning and so they have to monitor the process to produce impact.

The problem that we often meet is that managers instinctively know that learning often does not lead directly to business results and can therefore be more than reluctant to take responsibility for what they perceive as an area which is destined to fail or at least an area of minor importance to their business results and targets.

The way to overcome this obstacle is to demonstrate that learning can have a high impact contribution to sustain the mission of the organisation - provided the learning process is properly managed.

Creating Competence is Only Half Way
A major driver for corporate training is the intention of sustaining the business strategies. To achieve this, many companies have established systems for competence accounting – allowing them to identify competence shortages and tailor any training and development accordingly.

However, this does not in itself secure impact. It is a frequent assumption that employees will automatically use what they have learned – and not only use it – but use it to the benefit of the organisation.

But who knows, unless we take the time to find out if people actually use their identified competencies to create business impact. Chances are that a majority of people do not, or at least not to the extent they could.

What is missing is the link from learning to actually changing behaviour in a way that sustains key business results. Making the participant aware of this link is called creating “learner intentionality”.

Creating Learner Intentionality
Prof. Brinkerhoff has designed a simple tool to create learner intentionality. The tool is an “Impact Map” – a map where each participant, in advance of the training, is asked to reflect upon….

a. What precisely do you think will be useful for you to learn?
b. How will you implement that in your daily work?
c. What results may that have on you job performance?
d. And, if possible,how may that sustain the organisational business goals?

Creating the impact map involves not only the participant, it also involves the manager, as he or she has to agree on the objectives prior to the training and follow up on the progress recorded by the participant.

It sounds very simple, but it may be difficult to accomplish. One major obstacle is that the average employee may only have unclear knowledge of the precise business objectives – a fact that puts the manager in the spotlight right away.

Another obstacle is the difficulty of overseeing the relation between cause and effect when it comes to training for business impact. Many participants find that hard to do, but in the end this may be the most important learning that they get, because it helps them focus on what is important.

Leveraged Transfer
This leads to another term used by Robert Brinkerhoff to describe High Impact Learning: “Leveraged transfer”.

Leveraged transfer means that the learner is encouraged to direct their focus on the issues that they are most likely to be able to succeed with. He/she is invited to single out only those elements in the training that they need, and is invited to look at goals that are most current and the hottest issues at the time.

Again this is a simple thought, but quite unusual in practice. Participants are usually encouraged to pick up as much learning as possible and not to single out the few things they need. Some may find it hard to accept that a large portion of the training content simply has to be ignored in order to focus on what is important to them.

But it does not matter that 80% of the content is “wasted” – if the participant can create miracles with the last 20%.

Do Not Teach Pigs to Fly
An individual competence profile will invariably show high scores and low scores on different competencies. Such a profile seems to lead to the conclusion that the person in question lacks some competencies and needs to improve on them. However, in a High Impact Learning environment, this does not really make sense. The High Impact Learning approach would lead to the conclusion that improving on those competencies where that individual has a high score is more likely to produce value for money. Instead of just raising the average, you create “champions”.

Very often training fails to support impact, because the wrong people are enrolled on the wrong programmes.

Ritualisation
One last obstacle to instituting learning as a Key Performance Process is the fact that is not supported by the IT-infrastructure of the company. IT is used to structure administration, sales, production and a thousand other things, even the competence accounting. But it is not used to support the learning to performance process.

Managers with many employees may find the High Impact Learning and monitoring the learning progress very time consuming. Even if each employee only requires short consultations, the number of people to be monitored makes it difficult to oversee.

We have collaborated with some major customers in developing an IT support system that takes care of the impact mapping procedure and the dialogue between learner and manager. Like many other IT systems, these have not been introduced without resistance – the simple fact that one more thing has to be managed is sometimes reason enough to be reluctant.

But once people get used to the system, it does carry with it some interesting benefits in addition to the primary purpose. For instance, as the process is logged, the system allows for analysis of the learning process itself and delivers valuable data for feedback on the progress and the learning efficiency to all stakeholders.

Make it Happen
Corporate learning processes are probably one of the most underutilised areas which may help improve business results. Introducing High Impact Learning may cause some resistance, but the documented impact on (measurable) business results is very convincing.

We recommend you consider having a go at the High Impact Learning principles next time you initiate a major learning program.

About the author
Finn van Hauen, M.Sc. B.com is partner in Scandinavian Training Design and is author of "Den lærende Organisation"(The Learning Organisation), ”Dare to Kiss the Frog?” and several others, ”Læring med bundlinjeeffekt”(Learning with Bottom Line Impact)

More information
> Please send us a mail with your comments to this article.

Resources:
”Læring med bundlinjeeffekt” (in Danish) by Finn van Hauen and Mette Denager, Børsens Forlag 2006.

Shortcut to this article:
http://www.mannaz.com/Mail.asp?MailID=118&TopicID=1379