Are You Matching a Need to an Intervention or an Intervention to a Need?

There are two basic situations readers of this book will find themselves in. The first is the situation of identifying and understanding a business need so that the most appropriate learning or performance intervention can be applied to solve the need. In this sense, the financial information in this book augments and supports the groundbreaking work of many WLP professionals in shifting the focus of the profession from training to learning and performance. Excellent books such as the Handbook of Human Performance Technology: Improving Individual and Organizational Performance Worldwide (Stolovitch and Keeps, 1999) and Performance Consulting: Moving Beyond Training (Robinson and Robinson, 1995) offer detailed methods and guides for looking at cause and effect, setting expectations, and deciding upon appropriate interventions. When in this situation, the WLP professional must use his or her knowledge of financial value to convince others that the new intervention is cost effective and should be purchased, funded , or supported in some way to solve the business need.

The second situation is to have an intervention already in place that must be shown to be valuable or at least valuable enough to continue in its current state. This situation is as applicable for the individual trainer who passionately believes in the value of a health and safety course as it is for the workforce development manager who suddenly needs to justify why his entire department shouldn ‚ t be outsourced to another company that says it can do the same job at a lower cost. For this situation, the information in this book helps the reader communicate the value of what is already being done in terms that are current, relevant, and striking for the audience.

No matter which situation the reader encounters (some will encounter both), step 4 (Identify Intervention) is not about using WLP techniques to determine the best intervention to solve the business need. It is about focusing your communication. In step 4, you must select a particular intervention or a limited number of interventions, programs, or interventions that you want to use to communicate value for your organization. There are three reasons for selecting an intervention for your value communication:

Learning to track and communicate value takes time. You will be more successful if you limit your focus so that you can do an excellent job with your communication.
Your audience has little time to hear about your value. You want to focus the audience ‚ s attention on what will have the most impact.
Even if you need to communicate the value of something broad, such as the worth of your entire department, you need to use specific examples to prove your worth. To do that, you ‚ ll need to focus on specific interventions or programs so that you can quickly communicate value in a short period of time.

For some readers the choice will be obvious. Whether the intervention is one that you are selling as an external vendor, one that you believe passionately about and want to support more, or one that you have been informed that you must justify or lose, the choice of how you will focus your value communication is easy.

Others may have a more difficult time. Often that difficulty doesn ‚ t arise because you can ‚ t prove decent financial numbers but because of your audience ‚ s perceptions and filters about those numbers .