So what? Why L&D needs to escape The Activity Trap

There’s a question that every L&D team will face eventually. It might come at budget review, in a leadership meeting, or buried quietly in a performance conversation. But it comes. And it’s two words: So what?

So, what happened because we invested in learning this year? What’s different about how people perform? How has risk reduced? How has this person grown? And, the part that trips most teams up, how do you prove it?

These are the questions the L&D community is grappling with right now Harry Chapman-Walker, CEO of Kallidus, and Lavinia Mehedintu, Co-founder of Offbeat – a community where L&D professionals share challenges and shape the future of the function – brought these conversations into the open in a recent live webinar. Attendees submitted their questions in advance, and the themes that emerged painted a clear picture of where the profession stands. This is what those themes revealed.

The Activity Trap is real – and teams are stuck in it

For years, L&D has measured what’s easy to count. Completions. Attendance rates. Engagement scores. Course volumes. These metrics aren’t worthless – they prove effort, they prove participation, they prove the function is working hard. But they don’t answer the question that business leaders are increasingly asking: what actually changed?

At Kallidus, we’ve named this challenge: The Activity Trap. It’s the point where activity gets mistaken for effectiveness, where reporting focuses on what’s measurable rather than what’s meaningful, and where learning looks busy and successful on the surface while its real impact on performance stays unclear.

When attendees were asked in one word what L&D struggles most to prove, the responses were immediate: effectiveness, outcomes, ROI, impact, emotional growth. What’s striking is that none of those words are new. They’ve been in the conversation for years. Which means this isn’t a new problem… it’s a persistent one. And the answer isn’t yet another framework. It’s a fundamental shift in how L&D connects its work to the things the business already measures.

The starting point isn’t a framework. it’s a decision.

One of the most consistent themes in the questions submitted was a feeling of overwhelm. People know completion data isn’t enough. They just don’t know what to replace it with, or where to begin.

The instinct is to look for a universal framework; a model that can be applied across every programme, every initiative, every stakeholder request. But that instinct is part of the problem. Every initiative is different. Every organisation is measuring different things. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, and searching for one keeps teams stuck.

The more effective starting point is much simpler: identify one or two programmes that genuinely matter to the business right now, and map them to KPIs that already exist inside the organisation. Not new metrics. Not new calculations. The numbers already sitting in dashboards across finance, HR, and operations: revenue, retention, risk, productivity. L&D’s job isn’t to invent something new. It’s to connect its work to what the business already cares about.

And before that, there’s a harder conversation: what to stop. Creating space is the prerequisite. L&D teams that are stretched across too many priorities, trying to measure everything, end up measuring nothing well. Narrowing down, picking one metric, owning it, and building a proof point around it, is how credibility gets built incrementally. A care sector organisation with tens of thousands of employees discovered that saving 30 minutes per employee on refresher training translated into a very specific, defensible number at scale. And once they knew that every 1% improvement in retention was worth around £400,000, a management development programme suddenly had a business case that any CFO could follow.

That’s the shift. Not a new framework. A decision about where to start, and the accountability to follow through on it.

Pick one metric. Put your name against it. Own it.

Stakeholders ask for the wrong things, because we keep giving it to them

Perhaps the most uncomfortable theme that surfaced was this: L&D has been complicit in the problem. Stakeholders ask for completion data because that’s what they’ve always been given. Leadership clings to happy sheets because no one has shown them something better. The system perpetuates itself, and L&D keeps feeding it.

In many organisations, stakeholders don’t fully understand what L&D can and should do. In some, there’s a more fundamental issue: learning isn’t genuinely valued as a performance driver. Giving those stakeholders access to content libraries and calling it an engagement strategy won’t move retention numbers, and tracking that data over time tends to confirm it. Learning deployed without a clear performance goal, and without shared ownership of the outcome, rarely delivers the impact it could.

The shift starts before a programme is designed. Co-create the measurement approach with stakeholders, such as agreeing on the KPIs, agreeing on when and how they’ll be tracked, agreeing on what access L&D will have to that data. This is what changes the dynamic entirely. It forces a conversation about what the programme is actually for. And if a stakeholder isn’t willing to invest time in that conversation, it’s a signal worth paying attention to.

Language matters more than most teams realise. Reframing a completion report as a risk reduction report doesn’t change the underlying data, but it changes the conversation. Asking a leader whether they’d prefer a completion summary or a view of how the organisation is reducing risk tends to get a very clear answer. The data is the same. The frame is different. And once a leader has seen what better metrics look like, the old completion report starts to lose its hold.

There’s a concept worth sitting with here: the difference between return on expectations (ROE) and return on investment (ROI). Delivering what stakeholders expect, because they don’t know to ask for more, keeps the peace. But it doesn’t build lasting credibility, and it doesn’t protect L&D when priorities shift and budgets tighten. The function needs to stop being an order taker and start being a challenger, bringing stakeholders into the process earlier, showing them what good looks like, and being willing to push back when requests don’t have a clear outcome behind them.

Don’t try to convince leadership to want better metrics. Show them what better metrics look like.

Not everything reduces to a number, but everything should point at one

The hardest set of questions in the session was also the most honest: how do you measure culture? How do you put a number on psychological safety, or coaching impact, or long-term behaviour change? These things feel real, because they are real, but they resist the kind of clean quantification that finance teams and leadership boards respond to.

The answer isn’t to give up on measurement. It’s to reframe what measurement means in this context.

Part of the challenge is a lag problem. Behaviour change takes time. Learning that shifts how someone leads, or how a team communicates, or how a culture treats failure, that doesn’t show up in next quarter’s data. Organisations that expect quick ROI from culture-level work are measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time. The question isn’t “did this work?” at six weeks. It’s “what are we tracking over six months, and are we seeing movement?”

Qualitative data is also significantly underused. Stories and testimonials from inside the organisation, including people describing how something changed for them, what they do differently, what the team feels like now, can resonate with stakeholders in ways that a spreadsheet won’t. A well-told story of impact can open a door that a completion rate never will.

The practical position: not every L&D activity needs a fully defensible number attached to it, but every activity should be pointed at a relevant metric. A programme on psychological safety can be linked to unwanted churn, or to manager effectiveness scores, or to engagement survey results. L&D won’t be the only thing moving those numbers, and that’s fine. The point isn’t to claim sole credit. It’s to demonstrate that the function is thinking in outcomes, not just outputs. Naming the metric is the first step toward owning at least part of it.

There’s also an intentionality question in how programmes are designed. Very little of what happens in a training event transfers directly into practice, that’s not a reason for despair, but it is a reason to design differently. Programmes built explicitly around a performance gap, rather than around content delivery, are more likely to move the metrics they’re pointed at.

You don’t need to own every number. But you need to be pointing at one.

The mandate is changing

Across all of these themes, the same shift keeps coming into focus. L&D is being asked (by business leaders, by organisations under pressure, by the logic of the moment) to move from reporting on activity to owning outcomes. That’s a different job. It requires different conversations, different relationships with data, and a different sense of what the function is for.

It also requires courage. The courage to stop doing things that aren’t working, even when stakeholders keep asking for them. The courage to put your name against a metric and be accountable to it. The courage to reframe the conversation rather than just deliver what’s requested.

The L&D professionals who are navigating this well aren’t necessarily the ones with the best technology or the most sophisticated frameworks. They’re the ones who have decided to see themselves as business leaders who use learning as their primary tool, and who are building proof points, one metric at a time, that demonstrate what that means in practice.

The Activity Trap is real. But it’s not a trap without an exit.

Catch up on the full episode of Mind the Gap here.