How to Create High Impact from Learning Interventions By M.Sc. B.com Finn van Hauen For many years most companies 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 the 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 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. What does it take then to create High Impact Learning?
Why Does Training Fail?
Probably it is not surprising, that failure is due to a lot of things – but it might be surprising that mostly the training itself is not the major cause. Looking at training interventions that fail to produce impact it appears according to Prof. Brinkerhoff that more than 80 percent fail because of factors in the preparation or the follow up of the actual learning event.
This knowledge of failure causes leads to two major conclusions. One of my major clients have at 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 problem that we often meet is of course that managers instinctively know, that learning often does not lead to business results – and they are therefore more than reluctant to take responsibility for what they perceive as an area destined to fail or at least an area of minor importance to their business.
The way to overcome this obstacle is to demonstrate, that learning actually can contribute with high impact to sustain the mission of the organisation - provided the learning process is properly managed. Creating Competence is Only A major driver for corporate training is the intention of sustaining the business strategies. To achieve this many companies have installed a system for competence accounting – allowing them to identify competence shortages and tailor training 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 organization. But who knows – unless we take the trouble to find out if people actually use their – registered - competencies to create business impact. Chances are that a majority do not, 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. To make the participant aware of this link is called creating “learner intentionality”. Creating Leaner Intentionality Prof. Brinkerhoff has designed a simple tool to create learner intentionality. The tool – a so called “Impact Map” – is a map where each participant in advance of the training is asked to reflect upon….
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 hard to actually accomplish. One major obstacle is that the average employee has only a dim 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 that 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 Leveraged transfer means that the learner is encouraged to direct focus on the issues that he is most likely to be able to succeed with. He is invited to single out only those elements in the training that he needs, and he is invited to look at goals that are most current and the hottest issues at the time. Again a simple thought but quite unusual in practice. Normally people are encouraged to pick up as much learning as possible – not single out the few things they need. And many find it hard to accept that a large portion of the training content simply has to be ignored in order to focus. But it does not matter that 80% of the content is “wasted” – if the participant creates 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 them. But in a High Impact Learning environment that does not really make sense. The High Impact Learning approach would lead to the conclusion that improving those competencies where that individual has a high score is more likely to produce value for money. In stead of just raising the average, you create “champions”. Very often training fails to support impact, because the wrong persons are enrolled in the wrong programmes. Ritualization 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 therefore find 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 therefore in collaboration with some major customers developed an IT support system that takes care of the impact mapping procedure and the dialogue between learner and manager. Like many other IT systems that are not 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 underutilized 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 Resources: ”Læring med bundlinjeeffekt” (in Danish) by
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To create a reliable environment for High Impact Learning one has to ask why training fails to produce business impact. 
The second major conclusion is that learning cannot be the responsibility of the training department alone – 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 they have to monitor the process to produce impact. 
