The question I ask every organization before I design anything

I've sat through a lot of training programs in my career. Some were genuinely transformative. Others were well-intentioned, expensive, and completely missed the mark.

One in particular has stayed with me for years — not because it was a minor disappointment, but because it was such a perfect example of how good intentions and poor design can actually make things worse.

The workshop that wasn't safe

The team I was part of was struggling. There was visible tension, a lack of trust, and real communication breakdowns that were affecting the work. I was the one who flagged it to HR and leadership. I'd read the research on psychological safety: Amy Edmondson's work with the Google Project Aristotle findings. I genuinely believed that a well-facilitated workshop could open things up.

Leadership agreed. They brought in an expensive consulting firm. A date was set. And then we all sat in a room together: the same people who didn't trust each other, and were asked to be vulnerable.

One colleague started crying and left the room. Others went silent. The facilitators pressed on with their agenda. By the end of the session, the tension in the team hadn't been released. It had been exposed, without a container safe enough to hold it.

The diagnosis had been right. The intervention was wrong.

The follow-up that didn't follow through

A few months later, the organization tried again. This time, a different firm conducted private surveys with the team. The feedback was anonymized. It felt safer. People were honest. Then the results were delivered to leadership.

Leadership was defensive. The feedback was questioned, minimized, and ultimately set aside. No structural changes followed. No real conversation was had. The survey became another data point that disappeared into a folder somewhere.

What struck me wasn't that leadership struggled to hear difficult feedback, that's deeply human and understandable. What struck me was that nobody had designed for that moment. There was no preparation for how leadership would receive hard truths. No coaching, no framework for processing it, no follow-through plan.

The program ended when the report was delivered. But the work hadn't even started yet.

What I learned from being in that room

Those experiences shaped how I think about people development more than any certification or methodology has. Because I've felt what it's like when a program is designed around a deliverable (like a workshop, a report, a set of slides) rather than around an actual, lasting outcome.

And I've noticed the pattern is almost always the same: the intervention is chosen before the outcome is defined.

This is one of the most persistent challenges in the field. Research from Robert Brinkerhoff's Success Case Method and Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation consistently points to the same root cause: organizations design learning content first, and think about impact later (if at all). A well-cited statistic in L&D circles suggests that the majority of corporate training doesn't produce lasting behavior change. Not because the content is poor, but because success was never clearly defined before a single slide was built.

The question that changes everything

Now, when I sit down with an organization before designing anything, I ask one question early: "What does success look like six months after this program ends?"

The answers or silences tell me almost everything I need to know. When a team can answer that question with specificity:"Our managers will be having weekly one-on-ones that their direct reports genuinely find valuable" or "Our cross-functional teams will be able to navigate disagreement without it escalating to leadership", we have something to design toward. Every content choice, every facilitation approach, every reinforcement strategy gets shaped by that north star.

If they can't answer it, that's not a failure. It's useful information. It tells me that the work of alignment hasn't happened yet. And that if we skip it and go straight to content, we risk building another beautiful workshop that leaves people exactly where they started. Sometimes more frustrated than before.

Design for the moment after

The psychological safety workshop I sat through wasn't bad because the facilitators were unskilled. It was bad because nobody had asked: what needs to be true in this organization before people will feel safe enough to participate? Nobody had designed for the conditions the program required to work.

That's the conversation I want to have before anything else. I want to align on what the organization needs to look like when the program works (not what the workshop will cover). What does success look like six months after this ends?

If you're not sure yet, that's exactly where a discovery conversation begins. Happy to share how I approach this in a discovery conversation. Send me a message.