I spent more than a decade inside learning and development teams at large, fast-moving companies. I loved the work. But one thing sat with me the whole time, and over the last few years it hardened into a conviction: we have almost no evidence that what we do actually changes anything.
There is a lot of money in this space, and a lot of talented people. Yet every year, when the mid-year budget forecasts get rolled up, L&D is one of the first lines a finance leader looks at and asks, "What did that buy us?" Most of us cannot give a good answer. We can say how many people attended and whether they liked it. That is usually the best we have got.
I sat down with Gerry Murray on his podcast Leading People to talk about why this keeps happening. The title of the episode says it plainly: most training fails before it even begins. Here is what I mean by that.
The problem was never the content
When someone does not change their behaviour after a course, our instinct is to look at the course. Was the content good enough? Was the facilitator engaging? Should we have made it shorter, slicker, more interactive?
That is the wrong place to look. The training itself is a small part of what decides whether behaviour changes. A rough guideline that L&D people know well is that roughly a fifth of the outcome comes from the training, and the rest comes from what happens before it and after it. The exact split shifts from person to person and course to course, so treat the numbers as a signpost, not a hard statistic. The point behind them holds either way: most of what determines whether training works is the environment the learner sits in, not the session itself.
Think about how we usually develop people. We take them out of their work, put them somewhere safe where they can practise and make mistakes, help them see things differently, then send them back. When they return, nothing in that environment has changed. The only thing different is that one person now has some new information. Everything around them is exactly as it was, so it quietly pulls them back to how they worked before.
That is why the session is the part everyone watches and the least of the problem.
The manager is the gateway
If the environment is what matters, then the single most important person is the learner's manager.
We care what our manager thinks. Our manager holds the door to bonuses, performance reviews, the time off we asked for, the shift we wanted to swap. So when a manager signals that something matters, we treat it as though it matters. When they signal it does not, we treat it that way too.
Picture two versions of the same moment. In the first, your manager catches you before a course and says, "This thing is on next week. Would you mind sitting through it? We need someone from the team who has been, but get back quickly, we need you on the queue." She has just told you the training does not matter. You will show up, half-listen, and go back to your desk. An hour of your time gone, and your team's productivity with it.
Now the second version. She sits you down and says, "There is a session next week. I think it is going to help us. It is something we do not have on this team yet, and it connects to what we really care about. Would you go, and then help us work out how to apply it here?" That is a thirty-second conversation. But now you walk in taking notes, absorbing everything you can, because you know your manager is expecting something to come back with you.
Same training. Same person. Two completely different outcomes, decided before the session ever starts. And here is the part that makes this workable: you do not have to teach managers about learning science to get the second version. Sitting down with your team before something important, and checking in afterwards, is just good management. Frame it as helping them hit their own goals, because that is exactly what it is.
Faster content is a faster car to the same wall
There is a lot of pressure on L&D right now, and most of it points the wrong way. The pitch we keep hearing is that content is getting faster to make, so here is a way to make it even faster. We spend a lot of our time making content, so the offer lands.
But it is a dead end. Faster content will not get you anywhere new. It just gets you to the same wall in a faster car.
Our job was never to produce more material. It is to help people change, improve, and move the numbers the business cares about. Faster content does not do that, and neither does shorter content. It was mostly an environment problem all along, and the environment is the one thing speed does not touch. So the real question is not how to make content quicker. It is what to do with the time that speed gives back. My answer: spend it on the environment. Understand the real drivers of behaviour change, and get out of the content race as fast as you can.
Saying no, with a number
The hardest word in L&D is "no." A request comes in for communication skills training, and our reflex is to ask when you would like it by. We become order-takers. And every course we agree to is a real cost: the build, the facilitator, and the bigger, quieter cost of pulling people out of their jobs.
So the first thing I built into Multiply is a readiness check that runs before anything gets designed. It starts by making the person requesting the training define the problem in terms of the behaviour they actually want to see. If they cannot describe it as a behaviour, it is probably not a training problem. Then it gathers input from three sides: the requester, the people who are meant to be doing the behaviour, and their supervisors, who can confirm or deny that there is a real gap. It triangulates all of that and gives you a readiness score.
I think of it as a shield to say no. Saying no is one of the hardest things to do in L&D, and this gives you something to point to: "We can run this, but the evidence suggests only a small share of it will actually stick, and here is why. Here is what would move the needle instead." That is not obstruction. That is a performance consultant doing their job. It is the shift from order-taker to performance consultant that every L&D team has to make eventually.
Gerry told a story that captures the cost of finding this out too late. He was once asked to teach junior people to communicate with senior leaders. Standing in reception before the session, he noticed a screen advertising counselling for the staff. In the room, someone told him, "I enjoyed this, but I do not think I should have been on it. The senior team should have been." The real problem was that people were scared to speak up. No amount of communication training fixes that. A readiness check surfaces it before the money is spent, not after.
Look at the soil, not the seed
If you take one thing from all of this, let it be this. When you are trying to help people grow, you can spend all your effort on the seed. Breed a better one, a better course, a better facilitator, a slicker deck. But if you keep planting good seeds in exhausted soil, nothing grows, and you end up blaming the seed.
So look down. Look at the ground, the conditions, everything around the seed. The manager who primes the learner before the session and coaches them after it. The environment they return to. The line from the training to a behaviour to a number that leadership actually cares about. That is the soil. It is where growth is decided, and it is the part we spend the least time on.
As Gerry put it in our conversation, you cannot learn what you do not attend to. Before transfer, before learning, there is attention, and attention depends on whether the person was ever really in the room. That is set long before the session starts, by the environment we keep ignoring.
Training is one tool in the tool belt. A powerful one, when it is designed as part of the whole system around it. On its own, in bad soil, it was never going to be enough.
Curious what a readiness check would say about your next big training request? Book a demo and I will show you. And thanks to Gerry Murray for the conversation that shaped this piece.