This is a guest post by Skyler Treat. Skyler is an MBM training program alumna who is passionate about making those who advances economic freedom more efficient. She is always looking for new assessment, evaluation, and measurement resources. Feel free to recommend resources she should check out in the comments.

It seems that most measurement “experts” offer expensive plans promising to be the silver bullet which solves all your measurement challenges. While Robert Brinkeroff’s book, the Success Case Method, has some of that silver bullet feel the method can be easily adapted to be lower cost and less time intensive than the book suggests.

The Success Case Method (SCM) is simply a systematic way of analyzing what enabled or inhibited participants of training from using the training to get better results. Most of the examples Brinkerhoff gives are related to workplace training but I could see the SCM being applied to any initiative meant to help individuals or organizations get better results. This might include educational initiatives, trainings, or organizational change initiatives.

Brinkerhoff argues that after training there are those who change their behavior to get better results and those who do not. Trying to measure an average rate of success for participants simply muddles the picture. It causes the program to seem modestly effective at best and at its worst it obscures beneficial changes that could be made to the program.

Those who are more statistically minded might object to an approach that seemingly focuses on outliers. However, looking for patterns among those who were able to be successful is a great way to replicate success. Trying to raise the average success rate of your participants while having little or no understanding of what hinders or helps them succeed seems particularly difficult. The stories of success themselves can be powerful examples for future trainings as they give trainees useful examples of applications.

The measurement method outlined in The Success Case Method is by far too formal and costly for most organizations or individuals to implement. Recently, I was able to implement a less costly version to see what participants were applying from a training session. I worked with the training leader to figure out what behaviors she would expect participants to have if they were getting outstanding results, good results or doing a minimum. It was helpful that the trainer was able to narrow down the behaviors to those she cared about the most and could prioritize what mattered as a result of the training. She then emailed all the trainees to see if anyone was getting good results applying the training.

After she got all the emails back, I went through and picked about 25% that seemed the most promising. Then, I interviewed those people to see if and how they were getting results. After the interviews, we talked to several of the interviewees’ co-workers and supervisors to see if they had noticed better results.

We found one case where we thought the person was getting better results due to the training, and we also got some really good thoughtful suggestions about how to improve the training. As a result, the trainer is going to increase the time of a specific activity during the training. Also, it confirmed the trainer’s suspicion that the training was more of a fun activity than useful and seriously applied. The project was completed in three weeks with only about 3-4 hours spent on it each week.

Have you tried SCM on anything? What other measures have you tried to implement? Have they helped you improve your projects? Do you know what aspects of your change initiative have changed people’s behavior?

Thanks to Skyler for the post. If you’d like to submit a potential guest post, please email Ann (ann.zerkle (at) cgkfoundation.org).

Marginal Analysis, Measures