How does training ‘move the needle’?
People are your most valuable asset — right? I hear this repeatedly, but what can you do to maximise their value to you? One lever is effective, business relevant training. Not only does this help the business, but high quality business education grows your people at a personal level. If it is clear what is in it for the business and also what is in it for the individual, win win. But can you trace a direct line between your training investment and the value of your business?
Most organisations and training providers can’t. Not because the link doesn’t exist, it does, and it’s powerful, but because most training isn’t designed with value creation in mind.
Let me explain what I mean.
How do you drive value in a business?
Strip away the complexity, and business value comes down to growing cash flow. What are the seven fundamental drivers of cash flow: revenue, cost management, optimising working capital, handling taxation efficiently, making smart capital investments, sustaining competitive advantage (the so called moat), and optimising funding to reduce financing costs.
Every decision your team makes touches one or more of these levers. Every commercial conversation your teams have, with clients, suppliers, partners, has the potential to move them. Which means your people’s capability is not a soft metric. It’s a direct feed to business value.
So why do we still measure training success by completion rates and satisfaction scores? Shouldn’t we connect it to business value? I think people are often frightened to do this as they fear the results.
The Gap Between Knowledge and Behaviour
Is your training focused on knowledge share (slides) or about changing behaviour — creating a contained environment within which people can move freely and make their own discoveries? Knowing and doing are very different things.
When the pressure is on, when a client is pushing back on price, when a team is debating whether to extend credit, when a manager is deciding whether to accelerate a capital project, people don’t reach for their course notes. They rely on instinct, pattern recognition, and experience.
Knowledge-based training rarely changes instinct. Experience does.
What Simulation-Based Learning Changes
Experiential learning, properly designed simulation, puts people inside the decision. Not as observers, but as participants with an emotional stake in the outcome.
When a team runs a business through growth, faces a cash squeeze, negotiates terms with suppliers, and watches their working capital position deteriorate in real time, something shifts. The concepts stop being abstract. Revenue pressure feels real. The cost of poor debtor management becomes visceral. The value of a strong banking relationship becomes obvious, not because they ‘know’ that it should be, but because they experience that without it they will not prosper.
This is why simulation-based learning produces different outcomes. Not just higher retention of information, but genuine changes in commercial behaviour. And commercial behaviour is what moves the value drivers — get it right and performance improves, get it wrong…
Tracing the Line to Business Value
Consider what changes when your teams genuinely understand and feel the impact of those cash flow drivers:
Sales teams who understand margin and working capital stop discounting reflexively and protect revenue quality instead. Finance business partners who have experienced real capital allocation decisions make better cases for investment. Relationship managers who have navigated a business through a funding crunch know exactly what questions to ask and what solutions actually help. Leaders who have run a simulated business from startup to scale understand why the cost of funds matters long before it becomes a crisis.
These aren’t marginal improvements. They compound. Better commercial decisions, made consistently, across an organisation, over time. That’s how training actually moves the needle on business value.
The ROI Question
It’s fair to ask: how do you measure this? The honest answer is that behavioural change is harder to quantify than course completion. The right question, for sure, is “what did this training cost?”, but coupled with “how did behaviour change and how did that translate into more revenue, better cost management, enhanced working capital management, improved business cases and capex, product development and marketing that protects the moat?” These are all quantifiable and make that ROI calculation much clearer. Can businesses afford to have their people making commercially sensitive decisions in an environment where they lack a clear understanding of input to output?
Simulation-based learning won’t solve everything. But it’s the closest thing to building genuine experience at scale, without waiting years for your people to acquire it in the field, and sandboxing some of the cost of the mistakes that they’d inevitably make along the way — which is after all what experiential learning, whether designed by a training specialist or just presented by life, is all about.
The Shift Worth Making
If you’re responsible for capability development in a commercial organisation, the most valuable question you can ask is: does our training actually change how our people think about value?
Not what they know. What they do.
Authored by David Shuttleworth, Managing Director at MDA Training
