Your training budget gets spent every year. Most of it buys activity, not performance. The difference is decided at the moment of approval, and most approvals are a formality. Someone senior asks, someone in L&D nods, the money moves.
The Training Budget Gate changes that moment. Seven criteria, each a yes or no. Every yes must be evidenced, not asserted. Pass all seven and the spend is approved. Fail any one and the decision is not “approved with concerns.” It is one of three: Fix the request, Defer it, or Stop it. Those are the only valid answers at a gate. This is the same discipline behind the Domino Map’s decision gates: leaders earn the right to proceed by making the conditions for success explicit, owned, and verifiable.
The request must name the business outcome it serves, in plain language, with a person accountable for it. Not a learning objective. Not “improve leadership capability.” Something like: “Reduce regretted attrition among first-year engineers from 18 percent to 12 percent by Q3.”
The owner matters more than the wording. If no one is accountable for the outcome, no one will notice if the training fails to produce it. That is exactly when training becomes theater: everyone did their part, nothing changed, nobody’s fault.
Source: eLearning Industry — Read the full article on the original site ↗