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Denver White is a proven leader of training teams, specializing in sales, technical, and leadership skills training. With more than 17 years of training industry experience, he has introduced new training technologies and modern adult learning to companies across the United States and Asia to increase revenue and employee efficiency. Prior to his work with AOL, Denver managed training projects for companies, such as Yahoo!, The Washington Post (WPNI), and Wolters Kluwer. As a consultant, Denver has spearheaded training for Fortune 500 companies and the UN.

Denver White

Sales Research on the Fly

Enabling Value-Based Selling

Andy Aguiluz, APTD is training manager at Techstars. She helps employees succeed by partnering with and empowering them to design and deliver scalable, adaptable, and collaborative learning and development solutions. Most recently, Andy spent two years providing internal operational support to the accelerator programs by helping to improve systems, processes, training, tool development, and knowledge share. Before that, she spent three years helping establish a few of the accelerator programs.Prior to joining Techstars, she led business case competitions and executive mentorship programs while attending the University of Denver. During her time in Denver, she gained experience with the challenges of scaling companies at RG2 Franchise Consulting, the Daniels Consulting Firm, and Biotrends International. Before earning her master’s, she operated a small aviation company.Andy has a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA in management consulting with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Andrea Aguiluz, APTD

Do you know why project managers dread the words “Could you just?”Picture this: You’re a project manager on the verge of wrapping up the final milestone, ready to tackle a small simple change request. After all, your client wants to add just one last “thing” to the training program. This turns out to be an entirely new concept with a cascading effect on the other modules bringing the delivery to a halt.Training managers and stakeholders frequently fall into the trap of adding “just one more module” or “a quick extra skill” to the curriculum. These seemingly minor additions can accumulate rapidly, transforming a focused, efficient training program into an unwieldy behemoth.Scope creep is like a minor home improvement. It starts innocently enough—"Oh, while we’re at it, why don’t we just...”—and before you know it, you’re redoing the plumbing, installing a hot tub, and considering a helipad for the roof.Scope creep is the project equivalent of saying “I’ll just watch one more episode” at 11 p.m. Next thing you know, it’s 3 a.m., you’ve finished the entire series, and you’re contemplating learning Korean to watch the spin-off.So, remember, the next time someone says, “While we’re at it, why don’t we just...”—Keep your antenna up. The Denver International Airport (DIA) case is often cited in project management literature as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked scope expansion. Despite its troubled construction, DIA has since become a successful and vital transportation hub, though the lessons from its construction remain relevant for project managers today.The Denver International Airport project, launched in 1989 to replace Stapleton Airport, was initially budgeted at $1.7 billion and set to open in October 1993. However, poor planning, design flaws, and scope creep caused delays and cost overruns, with the final cost reaching $4.8 billion and the opening delayed to February 28, 1995.This project highlights a key lesson for managers: managing scope creep is vital. Clear objectives, a defined scope, and strict change control are essential to avoid budget overruns, and delays, and ensure project success.The root causes of scope creep in training projects are multifaceted:Unclear initial objectives: Poorly defined goals leave room for interpretation and expansion.Stakeholder pressure: Influential parties may push for additional content to address their specific concerns.Fear of missing out: Anxiety about leaving out potentially valuable information can lead to overinclusion.Lack of change control processes: Without formal procedures for scope modification, changes can slip in unnoticed.The impacts of scope creep extend far beyond mere inconvenience:Diluted focus: As content broadens, the core learning objectives may become obscured.Learner fatigue: Overloaded curricula can overwhelm participants, reducing engagement and retention.Resource strain: Extended timelines and additional materials can strain budgets and personnel.Compromised quality: Hasty additions often lack the refinement of carefully planned content.Delayed implementation: Prolonged development phases can render training outdated before delivery.To combat scope creep in training projects, organizations must adopt proactive measures:Establish clear, measurable objectives at the outset.Implement rigorous change control processes.Prioritize content ruthlessly, focusing on must-have elements.Educate stakeholders on the risks of scope expansion.Consider modular design to allow for future additions without disrupting core content.In project management, scope creep is often seen as a challenge, but it can also drive innovation. Savvy managers leverage stakeholder engagement, evolving needs, and the pursuit of excellence to create value. The key is proactive management: fostering open communication, flexible change control, and a focus on core objectives to balance adaptability and discipline.Recommendations for L&D ManagersUltimately, mastering scope management is not about rigid adherence to initial plans, but about steering projects toward maximum value delivery. As projects grow in complexity, those who navigate the line between beneficial adaptation and scope creep will deliver exceptional results.The future of project management lies not in eliminating scope creep, but in developing the wisdom to discern when changes truly add value and the skills to integrate them seamlessly. In this light, scope creep transforms from a project manager’s nemesis into an opportunity for growth, innovation, and enhanced project outcomes.

Scope Creep: The Allure of “Just One More Thing”

In ATD’s Handbook for Training and Talent Development, 3rd ed., Lorrie Lykins ends Chapter 1, “The Evolution of Talent Development,” by calling out that employers recognize how important training is to their business growth and to strengthening company culture. She notes that talent development professionals are essential. She writes, “New history is created constantly by this profession, and the easiest prediction to be made for the future is that it will continue to change and evolve in areas we can’t imagine. You are more capable than most of not only imagining that future, but also bravely leading into it, inspiring others to accomplish what may have seemed unachievable not that long ago.”As talent development professionals from around the world come together this week for ATD22, they are making history. They will learn about the latest trends in the industry and business, network, acquire new skills, and explore real solutions and techniques for their top organizational and team challenges. Together, they will generate new ideas.Apryl Alexander-Savino, senior director of ATD Conferences, highlights, “This year’s conference focus is ‘people. perspective. potential.’ So much has changed and is continuing to change in the way we work and learn. In developing the programming for ATD22, we wanted to be a catalyst for the entire talent development community to connect with each other, grow and develop, so they can return to work with fresh ideas and practical insights to make an even greater impact in their organizations and with their clients.”Those are reasons industry professionals have been gathering together at ATD’s International Conference and EXPO for decades. In 1945 when ATD was the American Society of Training Directors, 56 people attended the first annual conference in Chicago, Illinois. Now thousands of attendees are gathering in person and virtually for ATD22. In the ATD blog post “Welcome Back to the Future,” John Coné, catalyst for ATD’s CTDO Next group, writes, “This is an amazing time for our profession. From now on, the future will be much closer and approaching even faster than before. But this is great. This is home.”Home, sweet homeBetween 1945 and 2022, ATD has experienced many milestones with the International Conference and EXPO. For example, in 1980, 259 exhibitors joined the national conference in Anaheim, California. That was also the year ATD (as ASTD) relocated its headquarters to Washington, DC. In 1994, ATD renamed the conference as the International Conference and EXPO. In 2004, ATD welcomed attendees from 79 different countries.More recently, more than 9,000 talent development professionals met in Denver, Colorado, in 2012—a new attendee record at the time. The 2019 conference achieved the highest attendance at 13,500. And while the past two years have brought disruption and uncertainty, ATD21 brought a hybrid model to enable talent development professionals to gather and learn and grow in spite of the ongoing pandemic.Alexander-Savino noted, “It’s been amazing to look back and see and hear what we’ve done together in the talent industry. It’s even more amazing to look ahead—immediately to ATD22 and beyond to imagine the potential in how we continue to create a world that works better.” This week will be filled with ample opportunities for you to learn, engage, connect, and make history.

ATD22: Another One for the History Books

Sally is the chief learning officer for a large well-known bank. She was recently brought in by her CEO to “professionalize” the Learning and Performance function within the company. Sally inherited a very extensive learning measurement system that rigorously cataloged the results of each training course using Likert-Like questions and numerical averaging.As Sally sifts through the data, she notices something curious. Instructors whose smile sheet ratings were consistently low were still teaching, even after several years of poor results. Sally, of course, is thrilled! She’s been mandated to professionalize the learning function and already she’s found a problem she can fix. She makes a plan. She’ll bring her team together to improve—or fire—the low-performing trainers.Brilliant, right? Maybe! It depends on whether Sally’s assumptions are accurate:Instructors who get the best smile sheet ratings will help their learners achieve the best learning results and the best on-the-job performance. Instructors who get the worst smile sheet ratings will produce learners who achieve the worst learning results and the worst on-the-job performance.Interestingly, Sally’s predecessors never thought to correlate their smile sheet ratings with learning results or on-the-job performance. Sally, like most L&D professionals, doesn’t think of doing this either. She just assumes that smile sheet results are related to learning outcomes. Indeed, as an industry, we tend to assume that smile sheets are telling us something important about the successes and failures of our training efforts. Are we right? Is Sally right? And does it really matter, anyway?In 2013, ATD and i4cp teamed up to examine how organizations measure the effectiveness of the learning programs. The research, reported in The Value of Learning: Gauging the Business Impact of Organizational Learning Programs, found that Level 1 smile sheets were by far the most common method of measuring our learning solutions. One implication from these findings is that we, as workplace learning professionals, get most of our feedback from smile sheet data.Consequently, because feedback enables improvement, the validity of smile sheet data is critical. In other words, if we’re not getting good data from our smile sheets, we’re not going to be able to create maximally effective learning.Research on Smile SheetsSo, what does the research say? Are smile sheets effective in giving good feedback? The short answer is No. Two meta-analyses in the scientific literature covering more than 150 research studies found that smile sheets are virtually uncorrelated with learning results (see Further Reading below). Specifically, both meta-analyses found that smile sheets were correlated with learning results with a correlation of r = .09.Statisticians tell us that correlations below r = .30 should be considered weak correlations. Therefore, a correlation of r = .09 is practically no correlation at all! It would be like correlating smartphone usage with hair color.Bottom line: Sally’s assumptions were faulty. Our assumptions, as an industry, have been faulty for decades. We’re all caught in the delusion that smile sheets tell us something important, when in fact they may regularly mislead us.A Smarter Smile SheetWow! What should we do then? Should we throw out our smile sheets? Should we collect data to be polite and then ignore the data? I don’t think so. After thinking about the smile sheet problem for a decade or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that if L&D professionals redesign smile sheets from the ground up—based on the science of learning and guidelines from the measurement field—we can build effective smile sheets.In Performance-Focused Smile Sheets: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form, (more info available at www.SmileSheets.com), I describe how to build a much more effective smile sheet. There are two critical aspects.First, questions should be based on the science of learning. Because we’re asking that our smile sheets tell us about learning, it makes sense to base our smile sheet designs on learning science. Second, we have to do a better job of designing our smile sheet questions. Most of us use Likert-like scales or numerical items, both of which are fundamentally inappropriate for smile sheet use. We also have to help our learners make good smile sheet decisions. According to research from Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014), as well as Kirschner and van Merriënboer (2013), learners don’t always know their own learning. Because of this, asking them questions about their learning may give us faulty information—unless we design our questions to support their smile-sheet decision making. Too many of our questions ask learners to answer questions they are not prepared to answer.Here are some of the major areas that smile sheet questions should target:ability of learners to successfully apply what they learned to their work learners’ full comprehension of what was presented to them learners’ capability to remember what they’ve learned level of motivation that learners will bring to implement what they’ve learned post-training resource that will guide and enable learners to persevere in putting their learning into practice.Most smile sheets do a poor job of targeting these issues, which is unfortunate because it is through these types of research-inspired factors that learning effectiveness can be discerned.Bottom LineMost of our smile sheets are ineffective and provide poor feedback. Fortunately, we can build better ones. Of course, smile sheets will never give us all the information we need. It’s critical that we also measure learning by focusing on learner comprehension, decision making, and memory, as well as measure application by examining the factors and results produced in the way of on-the-job performance.While smile sheets are never enough, most organizations will continue to use them, so we ought to make them as effective as possible. Scientific research makes it clear that our current smile sheet efforts are ineffective. Fortunately, the science of learning and wisdom from the measurement field give us hope for better smile sheets.Like what you read? Join us at the ATD 2016 International Conference & Exposition in Denver, CO, May 22-25 to hear Will Thalheimer speak.Further ReadingAlliger, G. M., Tannenbaum, S. I., Bennett, W., Jr., Traver, H., & Shotland, A. (1997). A meta-analysis of the relations among training criteria. Personnel Psychology, 50(2), 341-358.Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L. III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Kirschner, P. A., & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2013). Do learners really know best? Urban legends in education. Educational Psychologist, 48(3), 169-183.Sitzmann, T., Brown, K. G., Casper, W. J., Ely, K., & Zimmerman, R. D. (2008). A review and meta-analysis of the nomological network of trainee reactions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 280-295.

Are Smile Sheets Supported by Research?

Gregg Vanourek teaches at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship and the Royal Institute of Technology. Previously, he taught at the Euromed School of Management, University of Denver, and Colorado Mountain College. Vanourek is founder of Far Horizon, a training enterprise that connects the realms of leadership, entrepreneurship, and personal development. Before that, he co-founded New Mountain Ventures (an entrepreneurial leadership development company) and served as Senior Vice President of School Development for K12 (an online education company) during its startup years. While at K12, his team launched a number of innovative virtual schools all over the U.S., helping the company become the market leader in the space. Previously, Vanourek helped to launch and served as Vice President for Programs at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (an influential education reform foundation) and research fellow at the Hudson Institute (a think tank). Vanourek is coauthor of three influential books: Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (published by McGraw-Hill and a 2012 USA Best Book Awards finalist), Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (Jossey-Bass), and Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education (Princeton University Press). He has written several book chapters and reports, as well as numerous articles for leading journals and media outlets, including Harvard Business Review blogs and Washington Times columns. His writing has been featured in or reviewed by Fast Company, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report, New York Times, Leader to Leader, Publishers Weekly, Entrepreneur, American Management Association, Center for Creative Leadership, and more. Gregg is a featured speaker and trainer on the topics of leadership, entrepreneurship, and personal development. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Management (M.B.A.), London School of Economics and Political Science (M.Sc.), and Claremont McKenna College (B.A.). He serves on the board of the Vail Leadership Institute.

Gregg Vanourek

Jon Bergmann provides flipped learning training consultants to small and large businesses, governments, nonprofit organizations, and schools around the globe. His mission is to teach, share, and implement best practices for creating learner-centric environments that empower trainers to maximize their teaching impact while lowering training costs. By applying flipped learning principles, he has helped clients flip their meetings with considerable success. Jon’s corporate clients include Wella AG (Procter & Gamble), the Association for Continuing Legal Education, Abbvie, Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, and iSchool. In addition, he has co-authored seven books, including Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day and Flipped Learning: Gateway to Student Engagement. His radio show on the BAM Radio network gets upwards of 32,000 downloads every month.Jon received the Presidential Award for Excellence for Math and Science Teaching in 2002 and was a finalist for the Brock International Prize for Education in 2014. He currently serves on the advisory board for TED-Education, and holds an MA in instructional technology from the University of Colorado at Denver and a BS in science education from Oregon State University.

Jon Bergmann

Bryan Dickey is VP of operations at The Breakaway Group, A Xerox Company. He brings nearly a decade of healthcare and instructional design experience to his leadership role at The Breakaway Group (TBG). Bryan leads TBG teams in creating innovative HIT adoption solutions for healthcare provider organizations around the country while staying current with new innovations and the potential impacts on providers and clinicians. Before joining TBG, Bryan supported HIT solutions for a Denver based hospital system through project management, innovative learning design, development, and delivery, performance improvement, and system optimization.

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