Most failed training was doomed at kickoff — nobody asked the hard questions while there was still time to change the answer. Here are the six. Bring them to the first meeting.
- What will people actually do differently? Not know — do. If you can’t name the behavior, there’s nothing to measure.
- Which business metric does that behavior move? No line to a metric means no way to prove it worked.
- Is this even a training problem? If the real blocker is a broken process or bad incentives, training won’t fix it — and will take the blame.
- How will we see the behavior? Decide the evidence now. xAPI inside the experience beats a survey six months later.
- Who owns the signal after launch? A number nobody watches is a number nobody acts on.
- What’s the smallest version we could pilot? Ship a slice, watch the data, scale what works.
If question 1 or 2 comes back vague, stop. That’s the most valuable thing this list can tell you — and it costs nothing to learn now instead of after the spend.
How to run this in the room
Don’t send the list ahead — answers prepared in private come back polished and useless. Ask live, in order, and write the answers where everyone can see them. The friction you feel on questions 1 and 2 is the finding. If the sponsor answers question 3 with “leadership already decided it’s training,” note it and revisit after the pilot data lands; that sentence is usually where the post-mortem starts.