I came across a webinar last week called:

“9 Speaking Strategies that Drive Team & Learner Engagement Up 75%.”

It promised to help people control their voices, choose better words, adapt to any listener, appear more confident and improve their speaking style. All in an hour.

Now, some of the techniques may be useful – pace, pausing and emphasis can improve communication.

But the wording illustrates a familiar failure in learning design. The intervention has arrived before the diagnosis.

We are told that speaking strategies will improve “team and learner engagement” by 75 per cent.

Engagement with what? Learning content?

Measured how? Completion?

The key question for me is simply what evidence shows that speaking technique is the thing getting in the way?

People may be disengaged because a manager talks too quickly or uses too many filler words. They may also be disengaged because the work is unclear, priorities keep changing, the training is irrelevant, systems do not work or nobody acts on what they say.

Better delivery may make a message sound better. It does not necessarily solve the problem behind it.

This is what happens when we start with content and work backwards to construct a need.

The question becomes:
“What benefits can we claim for this session?”

Rather than:
“What is happening in the work, what needs to happen instead, and what is preventing it?”

The session itself may be perfectly useful but the failure is in framing a one-hour webinar as the answer to engagement, confidence, clarity, stress, loyalty and performance across almost every workplace conversation.

Learning design should not begin by making an intervention sound transformational.

It should begin by establishing what better performance requires and whether learning has any legitimate role in producing it.