ROI Is Not the Answer: Why Learning Leaders Must Shift to Return on Expectations and Performance

If you work in learning and development, you’ve probably been asked some version of this question more times than you can count:

“What’s the ROI of this training?”

On the surface, it sounds reasonable. Leaders want to know whether their investment paid off. But beneath that question is a deeper issue—one that many L&D teams feel but struggle to articulate:

ROI doesn’t actually tell us whether learning made a meaningful difference.

In a recent conversation on the Kirkpatrick Podcast, Vanessa Alzate sat down with Dr. Amy Heaton, Kirkpatrick Partners’ VP of Organizational Excellence, to unpack why traditional ROI has become one of the most misunderstood—and least useful—metrics in learning evaluation.

What emerged wasn’t a rejection of accountability, but a much more sophisticated way of thinking about value, effectiveness, and impact.

ROI Wasn’t Built for the Work We Do Today

Return on Investment was never designed for modern learning systems—or for humans, frankly.

ROI emerged during the Industrial Revolution, when work was linear, repeatable, and easy to isolate. If you trained someone to assemble a widget faster, you could clearly see the increase in output. Inputs went in. Outputs came out. The math worked.

But today?

We’re no longer dealing with conveyor belts. We’re dealing with people.

People who are influenced by:

• Their manager

• Their team

• Their workload

• Their psychological safety

• Their technology

• Their personal lives

• And everything they learned outside your training program

Trying to isolate the impact of a single learning intervention inside that complexity—and convert it into a clean financial ROI—is not just difficult. In many cases, it’s misleading.

As Dr. Heaton points out, most ROI calculations in learning are built on self-reported estimates, assumptions about productivity, and shaky cause-and-effect logic. The result is a number that looks precise, but isn’t truly defensible.

And leaders know it.

They may nod politely when you present the ROI slide—but their gut tells them the number doesn’t match what they’re actually seeing in the organization.

The Bigger Problem: ROI Doesn’t Help You Improve Anything

Even if you could calculate ROI perfectly, there’s another issue we don’t talk about enough:

ROI doesn’t tell you what to do next.

It doesn’t tell you:

• What part of the training worked

• What didn’t transfer to the job

• Where learners are getting stuck

• Whether the environment is supporting performance

So L&D teams stay trapped on the content hamster wheel—building more programs, more modules, more courses—without knowing which ones actually matter.

Vanessa shared an example from the military that illustrates this perfectly. A Marine reflected that while he barely remembered most of his formal training, one physical handbook stayed with him throughout his career. It guided decisions, supported performance, and had lasting impact.

That handbook likely cost far less than the training programs that surrounded it—and yet it delivered far greater value.

Without evaluation that goes deeper than ROI, insights like that remain invisible.

Return on Expectations: A Better Starting Point

This is where Return on Expectations (ROE) fundamentally changes the conversation.

Instead of starting with, “How do we calculate ROI?” ROE starts with a much more important question:

“What does success actually look like to our stakeholders?”

ROE forces alignment before solutions are designed. It asks:

• Who are the stakeholders?

• What problems are they trying to solve?

• What do they expect to see change?

• How will they define success?

When learning teams co-create these expectations with stakeholders, evaluation stops being a defensive exercise and becomes a shared agreement.

As Jim and Wendy Kirkpatrick have long argued, when expectations are clearly defined and met, L&D can “almost never be wrong.” You’re no longer guessing at value—you’re delivering exactly what was asked for.

This is especially critical in sectors like government, defense, healthcare, and nonprofits, where outcomes like safety, readiness, confidence, and mission success matter far more than financial return alone.

Return on Performance: Where Effectiveness Actually Lives

If ROE defines value, Return on Performance (ROP) defines effectiveness.

ROP focuses on behavior—specifically, whether people are doing their jobs differently as a result of an intervention.

But here’s the key distinction:
ROP doesn’t assume training is the only lever.

Decades of research (including work by Robert Brinkerhoff) show that most performance problems are not caused by lack of training, but by issues in the performance environment:

• Lack of manager support

• Conflicting priorities

• Broken systems

• Misaligned incentives

• Poor processes

• Low psychological safety

If those barriers aren’t addressed, no amount of training will fix the problem.

Measuring Return on Performance allows organizations to see where learning helps—and where the environment is undermining it. That insight is far more powerful than a single ROI percentage.

Why Stories Matter More Than Numbers Alone

One of the most important themes in the conversation is something many organizations are rediscovering:

Impact lives in stories, not spreadsheets.

Executives don’t just want numbers. They want to understand:

• Why people are staying

• Why they’re leaving

• Why performance improved

• Why culture shifted

This is why Kirkpatrick Partners is moving toward an Integrated Return approach—one that blends ROE, ROP, and contributive ROI using mixed methods.

By combining quantitative data with interviews, focus groups, and narrative evidence, organizations can triangulate impact instead of pretending learning happens in isolation.

The result isn’t just a better metric—it’s a clearer picture of reality.

The Real Shift L&D Needs to Make

At its core, this isn’t about replacing one metric with another.

It’s about shifting the role of L&D.

From:

• Order-taker → consultant

• Content producer → performance partner

• Metric defender → insight provider

Learning leaders who thrive in the coming years will be the ones who can sit with stakeholders, diagnose real problems, align expectations, and tell a credible story about impact—one grounded in performance, not vanity metrics.

ROI alone won’t get you there.

Return on Expectations and Return on Performance will.