I have previously been involved in a heated debate with Donald Taylor about a fatuous (from my perspective) argument he made that undertaking an ROI in training was not feasible because it was impossible to determine whether the training was responsible for the outcomes it claimed or whether other factors might not have played a part. My essential repost to this was to ask why this level of exactment was required when it was irrelevant or ignored in so many other areas of business, such as in advertising, marketing, financial analysis? Many managers can read and interpret sales reports which are probably more affected by external influences than any other element in business and yet they can still make sense of them. Marketing intelligence in the form of papers and reports can likewise be reviewed and analysed for their worth and value. The details of this discussion are here: https://www.trainingzone.co.uk/item/167798 A recent book published by Jay Cross called ‘What Would Andrew Do’ looks closely at the process of evaluation and proving the alignment of development and learning in organisation. He comes to pretty much the same conclusion as me on this issue. Here’s a quote. Great minds think alike or all fools think the same depending on your position. “Proof is a figment Otherwise brilliant people assure me that it’s impossible to isolate the impact of training. You can never tell whether some concurrent event has contaminated the results and negated their value as scientific evidence of training’s impact. To which I reply, “Baloney!” (Not an exact quote.) All quests for certainty in our uncertain world are futile. Business decisions are made with less-than-perfect information; it comes with the territory. Management is not conducting a science class – it’s looking for results. So the question is not: How do we prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a given training program produced a given result? The question is: What will our sponsor accept as persuasive evidence that the program produced the result? Working with strong probabilities, we proceed to make our case logically – linking learning to business results. Establish a causal link between a particular skill deficiency and a particular business outcome. If the owner of the problem buys into this logic and the way you will measure it after training, that’s all the proof you need.” Book details here: http://www.lulu.com/content/7196453