Why measure?

Why measure? Put the coffee down and hear us out

If you work in learning and development, you already know measurement matters. You know completion rates and happy sheet scores only tell you so much. You know you should define what success looks like and gather evidence of change.

The harder part is making room for measurement from the start.

You’ve probably been in the room when someone asks the question that makes even the most enthusiastic project team suddenly very interested in their coffee: How do we measure the impact?

It sounds innocent enough. But it can make a lively conversation feel a little cold.

Here’s the thing: it’s usually not that stakeholders don’t value measurement. It’s that “measure the impact” often arrives late, sounds like extra work, and lands right when everyone is trying to get something built and out the door.

So we want to try something different. Not another case for why measurement is good practice. You already know that. Instead, a more human case: measurement helps you spotlight what you achieved, strengthen your position, and make it easier to secure what comes next.

To write this article, I reached out to four partners in industry and academia for advice to share with you. These are the arguments we’d make if you were commissioning work. With any luck, they’ll make the coffee a little less interesting.

This is the first in a series of three posts. This one is about why to measure. The next will look at what to measure, and the one after that will get into how.

• Advice from a banking professional: “Don’t let your good work disappear”

Your programme might genuinely change things. But unless you’ve thought about how those changes will show up, they can quietly disappear into everyday working life. Your impact can be overlooked. It can be attributed to other factors. Or it can be reduced to a few positive comments and a completion rate.

That is a bleak outcome, given the time, effort and care that went into creating it. Without evidence, your carefully designed intervention risks becoming a beautiful, engaging waste of time. Or, worse, a compliance tick box.

A good measurement strategy lifts your work beyond that. It helps you tell a stronger story about what changed, why it mattered, and what should happen next. It gives you evidence for leadership updates, internal comms, case studies and award submissions. Most importantly, it helps position the people behind the work as leaders who delivered something meaningful.

• Advice from an epidemiologist: “Escape the prevention paradox trap”

Sometimes a successful intervention creates real value that never becomes obvious. This shows up a lot in prevention work: stopping things like data breaches, fraud, money laundering or safety incidents before they happen.

That kind of training asks a lot of people to do small, effortful things so that, somewhere, eventually, a serious incident becomes less likely. But for any one person, the benefit can feel remote. They may never see the harm their behaviour helped prevent, or feel the benefit.

The epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose called this the prevention paradox: you ask everyone to act, knowing most people will never personally see the payoff.

That is why measurement matters. You need to look across the whole system to see whether incidents are going down. But you also need to look at the behaviours that should be driving that change to see how it works.

• Advice from a commercial strategist: “Build the case for what comes next”

A year from now, you might be trying to secure the next phase, extend the programme, or persuade another part of the organisation to adopt it. Without evidence, you may have positive feedback and a strong sense that the work was valuable. But not much to stand on.

With evidence, the conversation changes. You can show what changed. You can explain where the intervention worked best. You can make a stronger case for future investment. You can turn one successful project into something others can adopt and build on.

You also stop having to defend the value of the work from scratch every single year. When the value is clear, the fight for budget becomes easier. You have created a credible blueprint that you and others can confidently use, adapt and scale.

That is a much more human reason to measure than simply saying it is good practice.

• Advice from a financial services consultant: “Speak the language they already use”

Maybe “measurement” is even the wrong word. What you are really after is insight: something people can use, not just something they can report. Gathering data is not the point. Doing something with it is. At its best, L&D can become an intelligence unit for the rest of the business: showing what people understand, what they are struggling with, what is changing, and where support is still needed.

Senior stakeholders come from all sorts of backgrounds: financial services, retail, manufacturing, the public sector, and more. But there is usually one phrase they all recognise: return on investment. It is tempting to steer away from it. ROI can feel narrow, as though it reduces everything to a number on a spreadsheet. But it does not have to be about money.

Used well, ROI is an invitation. It opens up a bigger, more consultative question: What needs to be different for this to feel worth it? That is a conversation worth having. And senior stakeholders are often more ready to have it than you might expect, because it is already a language they trust.

So instead of avoiding the phrase, use it as a way in. Ask what return means to them. Ask what would need to change for them to feel the work had value. Often, the answer is not a number at all. It is a description of something different happening in the organisation. That is the conversation you are really after.

A different kind of measurement conversation

Maybe you do not need reminding that measurement matters. Maybe what is more useful is seeing what it lets you do.

It protects the value of your work. It makes your impact visible. It helps you build the case for what comes next. And when the people helping you measure actually understand the behaviour you are trying to shift, the conversation stops feeling rigid.

It becomes one of the most useful parts of the project.

Come and talk to us about your measurement strategy. We’ll bring the behavioural thinking. You can bring the coffee. You might even get to drink it.