In this conversation Christopher Parsons and a co‑speaker critique common Learning & Development (L&D) practices that focus on learner satisfaction rather than real business impact. They argue that without clear, outcome‑based measurement, organizations cannot know whether learning moves the right organizational needle. The dialogue introduces performance consulting as a prerequisite to any learning solution: first conduct a gap analysis to identify the difference between desired and actual performance, then perform root‑cause analysis to uncover whether the issue stems from incentives, resources, skills, knowledge, or culture. They advocate a backwards‑design approach—define the desired organizational change, observe whether behavior changes, and then determine if training is the appropriate intervention. The speakers also reference Keith Grint’s framework of tame, critical, and wicked problems, explaining that each type demands a different response (simple management, urgent decision‑making, or a dedicated team). By correctly classifying problems and reserving courses only for genuine skill gaps, L&D can allocate resources to higher‑value activities like job aids, performance support, and community building, ultimately delivering measurable organizational results.
Chapters
You can't experiment if you don't measure because you really don't know what the outcome, if it's good or bad, unless you have a measure.
You don't necessarily know what the clarity on the goal of the learning program or a specific learning, you know, activity, like what is, what needle should get moved if this goes well.
Well, and that's one of the biggest issues in L&D is measurement, is too often they measure, did people like the experience?
Right.
And there's nothing wrong with that except that its correlation with actually having any useful impact is essentially zero. That's no correlation between whether people liked it and whether it was effective. And in fact, there's plenty of examples of the instructor who was not the most liked and yet was the most effective when they measure.
Right. How do you measure if learning's effective? What does that mean?
Ultimately, it's what you said. It moves a needle in the organization. You should not actually start an initiative if you don't know what it is you're trying to fix. And there's a field called performance consulting that I think essentially should be part of L&D, which goes in and says, before we create a solution, let's make sure we understand the problem. Now, what is the gap? Between what should be happening and what is happening. Is that gap significant that we need to remedy it? Let's look at all the gaps in the organization, figure out which ones we need to fix. And then what's the cause? So that's the gap analysis. And then there's the root cause analysis that says, why do we have that gap? Is it in wrong incentives? Courses aren't going to fix that. Performance support isn't going to fix that. We need to change the incentive program. If people just don't have all the resources they need to do the job, we have backlogs of stuff. Courses aren't going to fix that either. Now maybe it's knowledge. Ah, well, now we're beginning to find something. Is this a skill, something we need people to do that they can't do now or they're doing wrong?
Or maybe they don't feel safe and/or they don't feel safe to raise their hand if they don't know what they're doing. So now it's skills, knowledge, and culture perhaps.
Mm-hmm. And so you work backwards and you eventually say, what would people be doing differently that would lead to this result? And then you look to see, are people doing this differently? And then you work back and say, are we training them to do it differently? So these are the measures, but it's ultimately, what is it you need to change in the organization? If you need salespeople to be shortening the sales cycle, well, you figure out what the sales cycle shortening process looks like and you train them on that. And then you look to see, is sales process shortening? And is that yielding the increase in sales that we want, whatever it is?
But only after you validated that the problem isn't that no one wants to buy the product.
Right.
Because no amount of training on selling will help.
Well, exactly. That's performance gap. And the performance gap should be we're not selling enough product. And it turns out that the sales cycle is too long.
Right.
And so, you know, so why is the sales cycle too long? So you validate all this and then you figure out what the intervention needs to be. And sometimes when it's a course or a job aid, L&D steps in and develops that or curates resources. If it's a problem, that's when you assign a team, you know, where you don't know the answer. And Matt likes to point to a British historian, Keith Grint, who analyzed military but talks about three sorts of types of problems. There are the tame problems where you just manage it. There are the critical problems that are time bounded. If you don't act, somebody's going to die. Well, you just need somebody to make a decision. And then there's the wicked problems, the ones that you have to assign a team and manage the process and figure out what are you going to do. And different types of problems require different approaches. But knowing when you have the wicked problem, when to assign a team and when to test out the results and what sort of timeframe do they need. In many cases, it could be unrealistic to expect a significant change to come out of a week of meetings.
So we're kind of working upstream from learning.
Yeah.
To organizations getting better at classifying and diagnosing problems correctly so that the solution to every performance problem doesn't become training or learning or something like that.
Right. And while that may make training uncomfortable in the long term, if you reduce the courses you develop to the only ones where it's really needed and then you do them well.
Yeah.
You have more resources to do the other things like facilitating innovation, like creating or curating job aids and learning resources and making sure that the community is vibrant.
