How Can Organizations Regain Clarity, Control, And Predictability In Learning Investments?
After many successful years as a director and personal trainer in the Croatian branch of a large international training and development organization, Mario Buljan founded eWyse to raise the standards of digital learning. Under his leadership, eWyse has grown into a globally recognized firm, earning numerous industry awards for excellence in eLearning production and being ranked No. 1 in the world for project management by eLearning Industry. Having successfully navigated the company through hundreds of international projects, Mario is now spearheading eWyse's transition into a Business & Learning Performance System. His focus is on shifting the industry from "customized content" toward a governed system where success criteria are defined upfront, and results are owned at the executive level. With a strong background in sales and corporate leadership, Mario is dedicated to ensuring that learning is no longer a localized initiative, but a predictable system that drives measurable organizational results. Today, he speaks with us about the shift from learning as an activity to learning as a business performance system.
How do you define the biggest challenge organizations face 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.
Instead, L&D often operates as a function for the sake of having a function. It is rarely used by executive leadership as a strategic support capability and is more often treated as a nice-to-have necessity rather than an integral part of business decision-making.
You often speak about learning needing to drive performance, not just participation. What does that mean in practice?
Participation by itself means very little.
In many organizations, learning initiatives are mandatory, and success is measured almost exclusively through participation and completion rates. The content is often irrelevant to the audience, not connected to real work, and communicated simply as something people must complete.
What happens in practice is predictable. One person figures out how to get through the course as quickly as possible and then helps others do the same. Participation and completion rates look good on paper, L&D reports success, and everyone moves on.
But nothing changes. No performance improves. No business outcome is affected.
Learning in businesses exists with the purpose of supporting human capital in the direction necessary for business development. If we look at it through this postulate, then learning strategies are unique to the business they're developed for and most certainly need to (and as such will) impact performance. Ultimately, completion rates don't have to be documented—that metric is maybe interesting for course developers, but on a business level, it's outcomes that count. How people's skills and behaviour contributed to reaching set goals.
That is the difference between learning that drives participation and learning that drives performance.
Many organizations invest heavily in learning but struggle to prove impact. Why is measuring learning impact still so difficult?
I would not say that measuring learning impact is difficult. It is complex, but it is not difficult if you know what you are doing and if you have a system in place.
A strong system creates clarity. Without a system, organizations quickly end up in chaos.
In my view, the biggest mistake is approving an L&D budget without defining a clear system that aligns learning initiatives with the key results the organization needs to achieve. In an ideal world, this alignment is owned by leadership and cascades into L&D. In reality, it can also start the other way around.
Where the initiative starts is not what matters most. What matters is that no dollar or euro is spent on learning without a clear understanding of which business performance outcomes that investment is meant to support.
Once such a system is in place, the conversation changes completely. L&D is no longer a black box. It becomes a transparent, accountable system that exists to serve the organization and drive its key results.
What role does executive leadership play in successful learning initiatives?
Executive leadership plays a key role. Leadership sets the standards, defines the rules, and ensures that the necessary resources are in place to execute them.
In my experience, very few L&D functions will proactively build a performance-driven learning approach unless this expectation is clearly set by executive leadership. If no one asks for it, it is simply perceived as additional work.
Yes, there are cases where such initiatives emerge bottom up, but based on my experience, this is rare. Donald Kirkpatrick argued years ago that L&D should be accountable for results and that the initiative should come from them. It is an interesting and valid concept, but in practice, it is not how most organizations operate.
This is why executive leadership involvement is critical. Leadership must set clear standards and establish a system that aligns learning and training initiatives with the organization's strategic goals. Just as importantly, leadership must define clear standards and expectations for how impact is measured, while L&D is responsible for executing that measurement within the agreed system.
If it is not moving in the right direction, there is still time to react and make program corrections. If it is, everyone benefits.
You've introduced the concept of the Result Expectation Alignment Framework. Why is alignment such a critical starting point?
Result Expectation Alignment (REA) is a critical starting point because it prevents organizations from wasting money before it is spent.
Learning initiatives fail most often not because of poor execution, but because expectations were never aligned in the first place. Different stakeholders expect different outcomes. Leadership looks at business results, managers focus on behavior and performance, L&D looks at learning, and the target audience has its own expectations. If these expectations are not aligned upfront, the organization moves forward with false assumptions.
The REA framework creates a structured system that brings all key stakeholders into the same conversation and establishes a shared understanding of what success actually means. It defines what needs to change, how it will be measured, and how progress will be monitored before, during, and after implementation.
From a C-level perspective, this is where the real value lies. REA significantly reduces financial waste by preventing investment in learning initiatives that are not fully aligned with strategic priorities. It ensures that no budget is spent without a clear link to business performance and measurable outcomes.
Once alignment is established, learning initiatives become focused, measurable, and corrective by design. The organization knows at any point whether it is moving in the right direction and can adjust early if needed. That level of clarity is what turns learning from a cost into a controlled strategic investment.
Where does AI realistically add value in learning and performance today, and where does it not?
AI adds value across almost every aspect of L&D, from mapping expectations and defining performance measurements (REA) before any project starts, to analyzing and creating content based on conversations with Subject Matter Experts, to the digital production of learning experiences, and finally to monitoring implementation through agreed expectations and reinforcing behavior change via mobile apps and AI agents in the hands of every learner. AI helps and accelerates the work wherever there are clear goals, quality data, and a system that knows what it is trying to achieve.
Where AI does not help is wherever there is no alignment of expectations, no clear definition of success, and no agreed-upon measurement system. If we do not know which specific business outcome we want to influence, AI simply produces more content, more metrics, and more "smart" recommendations, but all of it sits on top of fog. Without Result Expectation Alignment and a strong governance and control framework (3C), AI becomes a shiny distraction rather than a true performance enabler: it adds speed without direction, which in practice means faster budget consumption, not necessarily better results.
What advice would you give CHROs and CEOs who feel their learning investments are not delivering the expected business results?
The sad truth is that this situation is far from rare. According to recent data, 75% of leaders who find their training programs ineffective are simply spending money, not investing it. 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 a performance lever directly connected to their key results.
The initiative has to start at the top. Culture change never starts in the LMS; it starts in the boardroom. When leadership clearly defines what business outcomes learning is expected to support and holds itself accountable for those expectations, L&D teams are usually more than willing to respond. From there, the task is to put a system in place, like REA and a governed Business & Learning Performance System, that defines expectations upfront and provides the tools and data to execute and monitor them, so that every learning investment is made with a clear line of sight to business performance.
Looking ahead, how do you see the role of learning evolving within organizations over the next few years?
Looking ahead, learning will shift from role‑based, course‑centric programs to skills‑based, performance‑centric systems. AI will make it possible to continuously map skills across the workforce and deliver highly targeted, just‑in‑time support instead of generic training based on job titles.
In practice, that means less "going away on a course" and more solving real problems in the flow of work, supported by AI copilots, learning agents, and short interventions directly linked to what people are doing. For CHROs and CEOs, L&D will increasingly operate as a business performance system rather than a catalog of programs, with a clear line of sight between key results and learning investments, instead of reacting to one‑off training requests.
If there's one mindset shift organizations need to make about learning, what would it be?
The one mindset shift is this: organizations must move from seeing learning as content and events to seeing it as a governed performance system that exists to change specific business results. As long as learning is treated as "training" to be delivered, it will remain a cost center; the moment it is defined as a mechanism to move clearly articulated key results, it becomes a strategic lever.
Practically, that means leadership must stop asking "What training do we need?", and start asking "What result are we trying to change, and what capabilities and behaviors need to shift 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, built on expectation alignment, execution, and measurement, so that every euro or dollar spent on learning has a visible line to business performance instead of sitting in a black box of courses, completions, and satisfaction scores.
Wrapping Up
A big thanks to Mario Buljan for sharing his expert insights with us on why learning initiatives fail and the role of AI in decision support. If you'd like to learn more about eWyse's integrated approach, check out their Business & Learning Performance System, a closed-loop system that aligns business goals, learning expectations, performance data, and execution. You can also schedule a consultation to talk strategy and discuss alignment, performance impact, and decision clarity.
