Start Next Year’s L&D Plan With Business Results
Not Course Titles – the calendar is the wrong starting point
Most annual L&D plans begin in the same place: last year’s calendar and a list of topics people have asked for. The courses that ran well are rebooked. The new requests are slotted in. The budget is divided between them.
It feels sensible. It is also how a plan ends up describing activity rather than value. A list of course titles tells you what L&D will deliver. It does not tell you what the business will gain.
The courses are not the problem. The starting point is. Capability does not execute strategy. People do. A plan built from topics has no way of showing where people’s performance will change the results the business depends on.
Start with the Business Results that matter next year
A stronger plan begins somewhere else: with the Business Results the organisation most needs to improve next year. Not the training it thinks it needs. The results.
That changes the planning conversation. Instead of asking business leaders which courses their teams want, you ask what they are trying to achieve, and where people’s performance will decide whether they get there.
Four questions make that conversation practical. Take them into every planning meeting with a business leader.
1. What Business Result are you trying to improve?
Start with the outcome, not the solution. Revenue from a key segment. Customer retention. How quickly new managers become effective. The quality of hiring decisions.
Push for precision. “Better leadership” is an aspiration. “First-line managers keeping their best people through the restructure” is a Business Result you can plan around.
If a leader opens with a course request, treat it as a clue rather than an answer. Ask what result they hope the course would improve. That result is where the plan starts.
2. Where is that result created, protected or lost?
Every Business Result is ultimately made or broken by something people do. A major deal is won or lost in a handful of client conversations. Retention is protected, or not, in the conversations a manager has when the team is under pressure.
These are Critical Performance Moments: the moments where strategy becomes human performance, and where value is created, protected or lost.
Ask the leader to name them. Which conversations, decisions, presentations or interactions determine the result? Where would a small improvement in behaviour create a significant return? The answers turn a broad ambition into a precise point of intervention.
3. What does ideal Professional Performance look like in those Critical Performance Moments?
Now describe what good looks like in those moments. Not as a competency label, but as behaviour you could see.
How do the best people act in that moment? What do they say? What do they do? Words like confidence, presence or influence only become useful once they are translated into choices someone could observe, practise and coach.
Most organisations already have people who perform this way. They are admired and depended upon, but their choices are rarely made visible. Asking the leader to describe them is how you define the Professional Performance the business requires.
4. What evidence will prove that Professional Performance, and the Business Result, has improved?
Agree the measures before anything is designed. If success is not defined at the start, it cannot be shown at the end.
Look for Evidence at two levels. First, Professional Performance: are people performing with greater confidence, influence, credibility, adaptability and consistency in the moments that matter most? Second, Business Results: has that improved performance created measurable value for the organisation?
Keep the sources distinct too. What participants report, what managers observe and what the business measures are different kinds of Evidence. Each has value, and none should be presented as another. Ask the leader which measures they already trust, because the evidence that matters is the evidence the organisation values.
Before you choose anything, find out what is happening now
The four questions tell you what the business needs. They do not yet tell you how far people are from it.
The difference between the Professional Performance the business requires and the Professional Performance people actually deliver today is the Performance Gap. That gap, not the topic list, is what the plan has to close. So before committing budget, look at current performance in the moments you have identified. Sometimes a focused conversation with the people closest to the work is enough. Sometimes it needs observation, stakeholder input and business data.
Only then decide what to build. It is tempting to move straight from the answers to a programme. Resist it. The requirement should determine the solution. Starting with course titles does the opposite.
What changes when you start here
The plan looks different. Instead of a calendar of topics, it becomes a short list of Business Results, the Critical Performance Moments that drive them and the Professional Performance each one requires. Every line of spend traces back to a result a leader cares about.
The conversation changes too. L&D stops being asked which courses it can offer, and starts being asked how it can help the business perform where it matters most.
Some of last year’s courses may still earn their place. But they will be there because a Business Result needs them, not because they were already in the calendar.