Part one of our four-part series exploring the CORE framework from Kallidus and Fosway’s report, Escaping The Activity Trap: Creating Enduring Value with L&D.
Learning teams are busier than ever. They’re creating content faster, rolling out programmes at scale, and reporting healthy completion rates. On paper, everything looks successful.
Yet when senior leaders ask whether that learning has reduced risk, improved productivity or helped the business achieve its goals, the answer is often much less certain.
This is what we call The Activity Trap. It’s the point where learning is judged by what was delivered rather than what changed. Completion rates, attendance and satisfaction scores can all indicate that people have engaged with learning, but they don’t demonstrate whether the organisation is performing any better as a result.
It’s a challenge highlighted in our latest report with Fosway, Escaping The Activity Trap: Creating Enduring Value with L&D. The report argues that learning teams need to move beyond measuring activity and instead build a clearer picture of the value they create for the business.
One of the biggest reasons organisations become trapped in activity metrics is because they start in the wrong place. Learning requests often arrive in the form of a solution rather than a problem, and L&D naturally responds by designing learning. However, before creating a course, choosing content or planning delivery, it’s worth asking a more fundamental question:
What business problem are we actually trying to solve?
Imagine a business leader comes to you and says, “Our sales numbers are down. We need sales training.” Or perhaps they ask for a leadership programme because employee turnover is increasing, or a new compliance course because incidents have risen.
These requests feel straightforward, but they’re rarely the full story. More often than not, they’re assumptions about the solution rather than a diagnosis of the problem.
Declining sales might have more to do with inconsistent manager coaching than product knowledge. Customer complaints could stem from inefficient processes instead of capability gaps. High staff turnover might point to onboarding, culture or leadership challenges rather than a lack of training.
When L&D jumps straight into designing learning, there’s a risk of solving the wrong problem exceptionally well. That’s why the first stage of the CORE framework is Context. Before deciding what intervention is needed or how success should be measured, learning teams need to understand the business challenge in front of them.
According to Fosway, the Context stage is about building a clear picture of the business challenge before any solution is designed. That includes understanding the problem in business language, identifying the stakeholders who own it, recognising how it affects organisational performance and gathering evidence about the audience and the environment they work in.
Instead of asking, “What learning do we need?”, L&D should be asking questions like:
These conversations reposition L&D from a delivery function to a strategic partner that helps the business solve meaningful problems rather than simply respond to requests.
Another reason organisations struggle to demonstrate impact is because L&D and business leaders often speak different languages.
Learning teams naturally talk about courses, assessments, completions and engagement. Business leaders are focused on customer satisfaction, productivity, operational efficiency, retention, compliance and revenue.
Starting with context helps bridge that gap by reframing learning requests around business priorities.
Instead of saying:
“We need a leadership programme.”
The conversation becomes:
“We’re seeing higher turnover among new starters because first-line managers aren’t consistently supporting their teams.”
Or instead of saying:
“We need more compliance training.”
It becomes:
“Compliance incidents have increased, creating greater operational and financial risk for the business.”
That shift changes more than the wording. It creates a shared understanding of the challenge and gives everyone a clearer definition of what success should look like before a solution is even considered.
Taking the time to understand the problem isn’t about slowing projects down. In fact, it’s often the quickest route to creating meaningful impact because it prevents organisations from investing time and budget in solutions that address symptoms instead of causes.
When the business context is clear, every decision that follows becomes easier. The right stakeholders are involved, the right interventions are selected, and the measures of success become far more meaningful than course completions or attendance figures.
Escaping The Activity Trap doesn’t begin with better dashboards or new reporting metrics. It begins by asking better questions and ensuring every learning initiative starts with a clear understanding of the business problem it’s there to solve.
In the next blog in this series, we’ll explore the second stage of the CORE framework: Outcomes and why defining business success before designing learning is the key to demonstrating real impact. Read here to continue.
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