FOMO vs. NPS

Missing Out on L&D

I thought The following excerpt from my book (v3 coming in later this month) would be appropriate as we enter the budget season. Two decades ago when Ed Trolley and I started doing executive interviews in support of our training organization assessments we were sure to ask a rating question for learning and development. As time went on it became the net promoter score question. Over time, and many assessments, we continued to improve our data collection to provide a deeper understanding of the potential, and realized, value that the learning organization delivered.  During this time we identified what we think was an even more powerful question.

Perceived Value Score (PVS) question:

“On a scale from “extremely impacted” [10] to “would not notice”[1], how would your business be affected if all of our L&D solutions went away?”

Startups are constantly seeking “product-market fit”. Simply defined by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and leading startup investor, “Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” The fear of loss, captured by the PVS data, was identified as a strong indicator of startup success. Sean Ellis, founder of Growth Hackers, a community collecting actionable information on how to produce high growth for organizations, sets the bar for PMF at 40%.  If forty-percent of your users aren’t rating your product/service top box then your product or organization doesn’t have it.

This gauge as to how essential learning and development is perceived by business leaders can be a compelling endorsement or call-to-action. The coronavirus shock has resulted in the provision of learning changing dramatically over the last six months. What was done face-to-face is now provided virtually or not at all. New skills such as managing at a distance were needed in short order. So now perhaps the question is less about business leaders’ability to imagine a world without L&D and more about today’s reality.

What is your learning organization’s PVS?

Author: J.

J. Miguez has spent the last 25 years designing Learning & Development organizations and the service offerings that support them. Learning domain explorer. View all posts by J.