It’s a rare day when I disagree with Seth Godin but Monday was one of them. In his blog post about data he said:

Reassurance isn’t going to come from more data–that’s a stall.

The disagreement I have is that LnD rarely collects the right data. We’re so focused on input metrics – how much, how often, how many, how long – that we lose sight of outputs, and worse, outcome information.

Reassurance won’t come from more data – it will come from collecting the right data. That means LnD need to be harvesting performance and business data and seeking out correlations between their activity and the results in the business. The best recent analysis of this was by Simon Gibson on the Learning and Development podcast. If you’re not listening to this series, you really need to.

If you’re supporting people through programmes, you have to be able to compare their performance to some KPIs along with colleagues who didn’t go through the programmes. If you’re creating mandatory online units and tests for people, there has to be a link to improved compliance and performance. Otherwise, what’s the point of what you’re doing?