'Fact' vs 'Faith' based ROI

The topic of 'Return on Investment' is one that features regularly in client conversations, and in one such discussion recently, our client drew the distinction between what they called ‘faith’ based (soft) measures and ‘fact’ based (hard) measures.

As we explored this further, they shared their belief that feedback at an individual participant level equated to ‘soft’, whereas alignment with business metrics equated to ‘hard’. This stimulated our counterthought that, while the ultimate goal is to equate any work to its impact on specific business metrics, there should also be a way that feedback at an individual level could be considered ‘fact’ based / hard measurement.

Kirkpatrick's classic 4 level model of ROI helps complete this distinction between 'Fact' based and 'Faith' based, in that

• Levels 1 & 2 - asking people what they will do and what impact they anticipate this will have on performance would constitute forward looking, 'faith based' analysis, whereas
• Levels 3 & 4 - checking with people how they have been applying this thinking and what impact this has had on performance (including examples of application and specific detail on the results / impact achieved) would constitute backward looking, 'fact based', analysis

The notion of gathering this 'fact based' input seems straightforward in principle, but in practice many clients struggle to do it in a way that is consistant and scalable. Having recognised this, FranklinCovey has developed an online tool to meet the need for 'fact based' feedback. This approach gathers initial feedback from participants on the new ways of thinking and new ways of working they will apply from given learning experience and then captures on a monthly basis examples the new and different results these have allowed them to achieve.