Not a sales page. A look at what surfaces when someone finally maps the whole picture.
A few months ago, I sat down with a new client I, to chat about some onboarding they thought they needed. I see this kind of request a lot. A mid-size company, a few hundred employees, growing quickly and moving fast, and training that had been built the way most in-house training gets built. Piece by piece, request by request, whoever had the loudest deadline that quarter.
After chatting with them, and hearing their challenges, I realized what they needed was someone to look at the whole picture and then make some recommendations on what really would solve those business challenges. So, I recommended doing a roadmap activity, so that we really built the right solution, and that might not be training.
The first thing that surfaces is never the thing you expect
When you map training against what the business needs, side by side, the first thing that shows up is rarely a bad course. It is usually a pattern. In this case, three separate departments had each built their own version of a leadership onboarding, none of them talking to each other, none of them aligned to what the company meant by “leadership” in the first place. Nobody had done anything wrong. Nobody had been careless. There had simply never been anyone whose job it was to create a cohesive story of leadership.
That is the quiet cost of not having anyone steering learning strategically. Not bad training. Redundant training, wasted time and money, misaligned training, training built to solve yesterday’s fire instead of this year’s goal, all created by capable people who were never given the vantage point to see the whole board.
The best learning solution is not always a training module, and knowing the difference is what makes you strategic.
The second thing that surfaces is where the real leverage is hiding
Once the redundancy gets named, the more interesting question becomes visible. Where is training being used to solve a problem that training cannot solve? In this case, it was turnover in a specific role, six months in, almost always for the same reason, and the organization had responded by adding more onboarding content. More modules. More slides. The turnover kept happening, because the actual issue was a management gap two levels up, not a knowledge gap in month one.
This is where it gets good, and honestly, where the real value of stepping back and mapping the whole picture comes alive. Not in building more content faster. In knowing which problems training can actually solve and having the standing to say so clearly when it cannot.
The third thing that surfaces is the hardest one to name from the inside
Every in-house L&D professional I have ever worked with can see pieces of this. She knows the onboarding programs do not talk to each other and every team has built their own solution. She has a hunch the turnover issue is not a training problem. What she usually does not have is the authority, the bandwidth, or the outside vantage point to connect all three, put it in front of leadership, and make the case for what should happen next.
That is not a knowledge gap either. As I have been talking a lot about this month, it is a structural one. Seeing the whole picture and having the strategic language and a seat at they table to act on what you see are two different things, and most in-house L&D professionals only have one of them.
Your organization might need a fractional learning and development consultant, not just a course builder.
What this looks like in practice
The roadmap activity is not a report that sits in a folder. It is a short, focused process, discovery conversations across the organization, an honest look at what training exists and what it is accomplishing, and a clear set of recommendations tied to real business outcomes, not just more courses. Sometimes what it reveals leads to one specific fix. Sometimes it reveals that the organization needs an ongoing strategic hand on the wheel, someone thinking about learning the way they think about finance or operations, without the cost of a full-time executive hire.
Either way, the value is in finally seeing the whole picture clearly enough to make a real decision about it, instead of reacting to whichever request is loudest this week.
Pick Your Spark
Here’s my challenge for you this week. Pick at least ONE that feels right, but still a little out of your comfort zone. The kind that makes you a little squeamish, but not the kind that makes you want to hide under your desk.
Option 1: Private mapping
Pick one training program you know exists in your organization and try to name, in one sentence, the specific business outcome it’s tied to. If you can’t answer clearly, that’s the whole point of this post in miniature. No one needs to see this but you.
Option 2: One conversation
Ask a colleague or stakeholder how a specific training initiative connects to a bigger goal the organization cares about this year. Just one question, in a normal conversation you’re probably already having.
Option 3: Sketch the bigger picture
Take fifteen minutes and rough out a simple list, every training program or initiative you know of across your organization, even ones outside your own team. Look for overlaps, gaps, or things nobody seems to be tracking. Keep it for yourself or bring it to your manager as a starting point for a real conversation.
Curious what yours would show?
If this sounds like the gap in your organization, or one you have a hunch about but have never had the room to fully map, reply to this email. I would love to hear what you are seeing.
About Dani Watkins
Dani is the founder of #IgniteLearning and the owner of Zenith Performance Solutions. She is an instructional designer, trainer, and eLearning developer who creates practical resources for in-house L&D professionals. She presents regularly for Training Magazine and believes deeply that good learning design changes outcomes, and that the right strategy makes that possible inside real organizational constraints.