How can organizations regain clarity, control, and predictability when learning to invest?
After many years of success as a director and personal trainer in the Croatian branch of a large international training development organization, Mario Burjan founded eWyse to raise the standards of digital learning. Under his leadership, eWyse has grown into a globally recognized company, winning numerous industry awards for excellence in eLearning production and ranking #1 in the eLearning industry worldwide for project management. Having successfully steered the company through hundreds of international projects, Mario is currently spearheading the transition to eWyse’s Business & Learning Performance System. His focus is on moving the industry from “customized content” to a managed system where success criteria are predefined and results are owned at the executive level. With a strong background in sales and corporate leadership, Mario is committed to ensuring that learning is no longer a localized effort, but a predictable system that delivers tangible results for organizations. Today he talks about the transition from learning as an activity to learning as a business performance system.
How would you define the biggest challenge facing organizations today when it comes to learning and development?
From my perspective, the biggest challenge is that learning and development is not positioned as a strategic function in many organizations.
Rather, L&D often functions as a function for the sake of having a function. It is rarely used by executives as a strategic support function and is often treated as a nice-to-have necessity rather than an integral part of business decisions.
You often talk about the need to learn to perform better, not just participate. What does that actually mean?
Participation itself is of little value.
Learning initiatives are mandated in many organizations, and success is measured almost exclusively by participation and completion rates. Content is often irrelevant to the audience, unrelated to the actual work, and simply communicated as something that people need to complete.
What actually happens is predictable. One person figures out how to complete the course as quickly as possible and helps others do the same. Participation and completion rates look good on paper, L&D reports success, and everyone moves on.
But nothing changes. Performance will not be improved. It does not affect business results.
Learning in business exists for the purpose of supporting human capital in the direction necessary for business development. Looking at it through this hypothesis, learning strategies are specific to the business for which they are developed, and undoubtedly must (and therefore will) influence performance. Ultimately, there is no need to document completion rates. While this metric may be interesting to course developers, at a business level it’s the results that matter. How people’s skills and actions contributed to achieving the set goals.
That’s the difference between learning that fosters participation and learning that fosters performance.
Many organizations invest heavily in learning but struggle to prove their effectiveness. Why is it still difficult to measure learning outcomes?
This is not to say that learning outcomes are difficult to measure. It’s complicated, but not difficult if you know what you’re doing and have systems in place.
A powerful system creates clarity. Without systems, organizations quickly descend into chaos.
In my opinion, the biggest mistake is approving an L&D budget without defining a clear system for aligning learning initiatives with the key outcomes the organization needs to achieve. In an ideal world, this alignment would be owned by leadership and cascade to L&D. In fact, it can start the other way around.
Where you start your initiative is not the most important thing. The key is not to spend dollars or euros on learning without a clear understanding of what performance outcomes the investment will support.
When a system like this is introduced, the conversation changes completely. L&D is no longer a black box. This will be a transparent and accountable system that exists to serve the organization and drive outcomes that matter.
What role does executive leadership play in making learning initiatives successful?
Executive leadership plays a key role. Leadership sets standards, defines rules, and ensures that the necessary resources are available to implement them.
In my experience, very few L&D departments proactively create a performance-driven learning approach unless this expectation is clearly set by executive leadership. If no one asks for it, it’s simply perceived as additional work.
Yes, such initiatives can sometimes emerge from the bottom up, but based on my experience, this is rare. Donald Kirkpatrick argued several years ago that L&D should be held accountable for results and that leadership should come from L&D. While this is an interesting and valid concept, the reality is that this is not how most organizations operate.
This is why executive involvement is important. Leadership must set clear standards and establish a system that aligns learning and training efforts with the organization’s strategic goals. Just as importantly, leaders need to define clear standards and expectations for how impact will be measured, and L&D will be responsible for implementing that measurement within an agreed system.
If you’re not going in the right direction, there’s still time to react and fix your program. If so, everyone benefits.
Introduced the concept of Result Expectation Alignment Framework. Why is alignment such an important starting point?
REA (Result Expectation Alignment) is an important starting point because it prevents organizations from wasting funds before they are spent.
When learning initiatives fail, it is almost always not because of poor execution, but because expectations are misaligned from the beginning. Different stakeholders have different expected outcomes. Leadership focuses on business results, managers focus on behavior and performance, L&D focuses on learning, and target audiences have their own expectations. If these expectations are not aligned in advance, the organization will be moving forward with incorrect assumptions.
The REA framework creates a structured system that brings all key stakeholders into the same conversation and establishes a common understanding of what success actually means. Define what needs to change, how it will be measured, and how progress will be monitored before, during, and after implementation.
From an executive perspective, there’s real value here. REA significantly reduces financial waste by preventing investments in learning initiatives that are not fully aligned with strategic priorities. This ensures that no budget is spent without a clear link to business performance and measurable outcomes.
Once alignment is established, learning efforts become focused, measurable, and can be modified in a planned manner. Organizations always know if they are moving in the right direction and can make early adjustments if necessary. This level of clarity turns learning from costs into controlled strategic investments.
What value is AI realistically adding in learning and performance today, and what value is it not adding?
AI adds value across nearly every aspect of L&D, from mapping expectations and defining performance measurements (REAs) before a project begins, to analyzing and creating content based on conversations with subject matter experts, to the digital production of learning experiences, and finally, monitoring implementation with agreed expectations and empowering behavior change via mobile apps and AI agents in the hands of every learner. When you have clear goals, quality data, and a system that knows what you are trying to accomplish, AI can help and accelerate your work.
AI is useless when expectations are misaligned, there is no clear definition of success, and there is no agreed-upon measurement system. If you don’t know which specific business outcomes you want to influence, AI will simply generate more content, more metrics, and more “smart” recommendations, all of which will remain in the cloud. Without alignment of outcome expectations and a strong governance and control framework (3Cs), AI will become a glorious distraction rather than a true performance enabler. AI adds directionless speed. This will actually eat up your budget faster and won’t necessarily give you better results.
What advice would you give to CHROs and CEOs who feel that their learning investments are not delivering the expected business results?
Sadly, this situation is far from uncommon. Recent data shows that 75% of leaders who find their training programs ineffective are simply spending money instead of investing. I would advise CHROs and CEOs to stop treating L&D as a necessary cost center and start treating it as a strategic partner and performance lever that is directly tied to important outcomes.
Initiatives must start from the top. Culture change doesn’t start with the LMS. It starts in the boardroom. When leaders clearly define what business outcomes are expected from learning and are held accountable to those expectations, L&D teams are usually happy to respond. The challenge from there is to implement systems such as REA and managed business and learning performance systems. This system predefines expectations and provides the tools and data to implement and monitor them. This ensures that all learning investments are made with a clear focus on business performance.
Looking ahead, how do you see the role of learning evolving within organizations over the next few years?
Looking to the future, learning will move from role-based, course-centric programs to skill-based, performance-centric systems. AI allows you to continuously map skills across your workforce and provide targeted, just-in-time support rather than general training based on role.
In practice, this means less “going off course” and more solving real problems in the flow of work, supported by AI co-pilots, learning agents, and short interventions that directly relate to people’s behavior. For CHROs and CEOs, L&D will function as a business performance system rather than a catalog of programs, with a clear line of sight between key outcomes and learning investments, rather than responding to one-off training requests.
If there’s one mindset shift organizations need to make when it comes to learning, what is it?
One shift in thinking is that organizations need to move from viewing learning as content and events to viewing it as a managed performance system that exists to change specific business outcomes. As long as learning is treated as “training” provided, it will remain a cost center. The moment it is defined as a mechanism that drives a clearly articulated and important outcome, it becomes a strategic instrument.
In practice, this means that leaders must stop asking, “What training do I need?” and start asking, “What outcomes are we trying to change? What capabilities and behaviors need to change to get there?” Once that question is clear, L&D’s role is to use a closed-loop system like eWyse’s Business & Learning Performance System, which is built on aligning, executing, and measuring expectations. This ensures that every euro or dollar spent on learning is reflected clearly in business performance, rather than locked in a black box of courses, completions and satisfaction scores.
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Many thanks to Mario Buljan for sharing his expert insights on why learning initiatives fail and the role of AI in decision support. To learn more about eWyse’s integrated approach, check out our Business & Learning Performance System, a closed-loop system that aligns business objectives, learning expectations, performance data, and execution. You can also schedule a consultation to discuss strategy, alignment, performance impact, and decision clarity.
