I once worked with a CEO who, upon meeting me as the new learning designer supporting their team, said, “It’s nice to meet you, but you should know, I think learning and development is mostly pointless.”
This is the moment I knew we would get along.
The CEO had inherited a firm that had been on the rise, then plateaued, and was now in slight decline. They had spent over £2 million on a global training programme, only to discover that almost every measure of organisational health had declined. Imagine! Two million pounds and everything got worse.
It’s because they had missed the signal.
The Signal and the Noise
What’s the signal? Nate Silver wrote a brilliant book about this, The Signal and the Noise, where he scrupulously explains why disasters often happen not through a lack of information, but through an excess of it.
The signal is the small piece of information that actually matters. The noise is everything else that distracts you from seeing it.
Silver’s central point is brutally simple: most failure comes from confusing the two.
A stark example is the 2008 financial crash. If you’ve seen The Big Short (my favourite film ever), you’ll remember the handful of mostly eccentric, stubborn people who noticed the housing bubble.
Because everyone else believed that “the housing market can never fail” (and because the financial markets are so noisy), they missed the signal that the housing market was a big bubble about to burst. They mistook noise for truth, and the world paid for it.
Learning and development goes wrong in the same very human, very avoidable way.
The £2 Million Training Mistake
In the case of the £2 million spent on training, that company provided 28 modules to their managers and leaders, including:
Influencing Skills
Executive Presence
Resilience and Wellbeing
Coaching for Performance
Emotional Intelligence
Strategic Thinking
Difficult Conversations
Decision-Making Frameworks
Change Management
They decided they wanted everything. Their intentions were noble, but their aim was catastrophic.
The result was that you had about 12 percent of the global leaders trained mildly in many things. What they actually needed was all leaders trained deeply in three things: strategy, communication, and building trust.
For a fraction of the price, they could have trained every leader, in person, in these three areas, and most likely would have seen incomparably better outcomes.
When you chase everything, you improve nothing. The only thing that grows is the noise.
What Great Learning Partners Do
A great learning partner does not begin with a menu. They begin with a question: of all the things your organisation could do, what will make the most significant difference?
The signal is the often inconvenient truth about what will genuinely change how your people show up and do great work, whether they’re consultants, leaders, managers, salespeople, facilities staff, and so on.
The primary role of your learning partner is to help you find that signal. One clear note in a world that insists on playing all its instruments at once.
Which is why I understood where the CEO was coming from. Too much learning and development misses the signal and thus becomes pointless by default and design.
Have a great week, and good luck with your work.
Benjamin
Created with
