Any high performance coach will tell you that a great training plan is useless unless you actually do the exercises and implement the plan. High performance business training and high performance athletics training fundamentally work on the same principles.  In both cases there is a direct correlation between planning, execution, achieving goals and the probability of winning.

 

However, most organizations plan training events and then neglect to monitor for execution and evidence of actually doing what the training was supposed to do.  This absence of follow-up and reinforcement is what inhibits real performance improvement results.  Effective training is not just about what you want your people to know.  It’s about what you want them to do.

 

We’ve all heard about the forgetting curve.  Different people remember more or less, but it goes something like this:  within one hour, most people have forgotten about 50% of the information presented at training and by the time a week passes most people have forgotten 90% of what they learned in a training session. 

 

Some people call this the "dirty little secret" of North America’s $150 billion corporate training industry.  No matter how much is invested in learning and development – nearly everything will be forgotten – unless the training strategy is underpinned by specific and deliberate follow-up exercises to ensure that the training knowledge is put into action.  Meaningful learning occurs by doing.