Founding Director ·
When designing a programme of learning, designers must be careful to raise their aim and expectations for what can be achieved. Set the bar too low, and the program will likely underdeliver. Set it too high, and you set it up for failure. Set it just at the edge of possible or stretch, and you have the potential for excellence.
What the sponsor expects shapes what learners attempt
Rosenthal and Jacobson’s 1968 study, Pygmalion in the Classroom, gave the idea its name. They told teachers that certain pupils were likely to show sudden gains, and those pupils did improve on later tests. The result has been disputed, so it is best read as the origin of the idea rather than proof of it. Livingston introduced the idea to the workplace in 1969 in the Harvard Business Review. He argued that a manager’s expectations of a subordinate shape how that subordinate performs. The question for a programme designer is what the sponsor expects of the learners, because those expectations will shape what the learners attempt.
A low bar does not stay on paper
Many programme designers set the sights too low and begin to make excuses for the learning populations they are supposed to serve. I have witnessed many occasions when the client representative places false constraints or limited expectations on their learners’ ability to change—born out of cynicism from too many programs that punched too low.
McNatt’s 2000 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology pulled together the Pygmalion research in management settings. It found that managers’ expectations of their staff were linked to those staff’s performance. A low bar set by a sponsor does not stay on paper. It reaches the people who must meet it. The designer’s task is to test the sponsor’s assumptions before they harden into the programme’s limits.
Design-mediocrity and the transfer of training
We call this design-mediocrity, where the learning programme is designed and delivered as a stand-alone series of events rather than as an organisational campaign or movement. Isolated efforts left to survive on the power of a workshop or an event, with little or no effort to remove systemic barriers to effective implementation, will blunt whatever impact they achieve.
Baldwin and Ford’s 1988 review in Personnel Psychology gave this problem a name in the research: transfer of training. They found that much of what people learn in training is never applied at work. The reasons lie as much in the working environment as in the course itself, including the support managers give and the chances people have to practise. A workshop that ignores these conditions is a stand-alone event by design. Kotter’s 1995 article in the Harvard Business Review makes a related point at the organisational level. He found that many change efforts fail because leaders declare victory too early and do not anchor the change in daily practice.
When personal bias steers the design
Leadership assumptions also play a role when operational leads leak their personal biases into the design, rather than maintaining an open mind and trusting in their specialist colleagues. By force of their personality and unhealthy authority gradient, their personal bias steers the program down the wrong path.
Edmondson’s 1999 study in Administrative Science Quarterly found that psychological safety, a common belief that a team is safe to take interpersonal risks, was linked to greater learning behaviour in work teams. People who feel safe ask questions, admit errors and offer criticism. A design team that cannot test the operational lead’s assumptions is working in a team with low psychological safety. The lead’s bias then goes unchallenged, not because it is right but because no one feels able to say otherwise. Locke and Latham’s 2002 review in American Psychologist adds that specific, difficult goals outperform vague or easy ones, but only when the people pursuing them accept them. A goal imposed by a dominant voice may not be accepted at all.
A delicate path for suppliers
As suppliers, we tread a delicate path, balancing the need to win new business with the risk of conceding on what we know won’t deliver the outcomes they seek. What I find is that evidence supporting your approach should be introduced early in the conversation. A reasoned, well-supported argument can help shift beliefs about what the organisation needs and what it takes for learning to stick.
