One of the more honest moments we’ve encountered at an L&D conference came during a strategy summit the Training Industry ran a few years back. The organizers had expected a debate about priorities, budgets, technology. What they got instead was a room full of experienced learning leaders admitting the same thing: they didn’t know where to start.
We’re not talking about new practitioners here but seasoned leaders who had already built programs and sat alongside senior leadership. The problem wasn’t knowledge. It was having a consistent way into the work – a sequence that held together from the moment a business need surfaced through to whether anything actually changed.
That’s a problem we’ve watched play out in a lot of the organizations we work with. L&D functions that are genuinely capable, genuinely committed, and still producing work that doesn’t quite land with the business because the strategy underneath them was built on assumptions nobody had tested – about what the business actually needed, what “success” was supposed to look like, and how you’d know if you got there.
At WeLearn we have developed tools that help L&D with parts of this. The Learning Strategy Scorecard is both an individual and team diagnostic that assesses the health of an L&D strategy across six dimensions, things like alignment to business priorities, measurement maturity, and governance – and gives teams a clear picture of where they stand before they start making decisions. It’s often the first thing we point people to, because you can’t set a useful direction without knowing your starting point!
How does your learning strategy stack up? Check out this learning strategy benchmarking report to see where you’re at compared with 100+ L&D leaders.
The Strategy on a Page template we built, takes you to the other end of that process. It’s a single-document view of who the L&D function is, what it stands for, and the four strategic focus points (with specific, measurable targets) that will move the business forward. The constraint of one page is deliberate for this. We always say, if you can’t fit the strategy on a single page, you probably haven’t made the hard choices about what matters most. A document that fits on one page is something a team will definitely use as a reference point when setting priorities, making investment decisions, and deciding what to measure. It also makes more sense to senior stakeholders who need that 10,000 foot view.
What we found was missing between those two things was the process that connects them, a structured way to move from “the business needs something” to a strategy grounded enough to hold up under scrutiny.
The SOAP Learning Strategy Model is WeLearn’s answer to that. It’s a framework we developed as a discipline for asking the right questions in the right order.
Situation. Objectives. Approach. Performance
It starts with Situation because that’s where most strategies actually go wrong. Not in the design but in the diagnosis. What is the business context? What’s driving the need for learning? What are the constraints – budget, culture, technology, stakeholder expectations – that will shape what’s actually possible? Teams often skip this because they believe they already know the answers. When they’re wrong, the strategy gets designed around the wrong problem, and no amount of good execution fixes that.
Objectives does a specific job: translating what you learned about the business into outcomes that are measurable and framed in terms leadership recognizes. Not learning objectives in the instructional design sense. Strategic commitments about what capabilities need to change, for whom, and to what standard. If an objective starts with “deliver” or “launch,” it’s describing something your team will do, not something the business will gain. That’s the test.
Approach is where strategy either gets real or falls apart. It’s about sequencing interventions, deciding what the operating model needs to support them, and being honest about what the budget and the team can actually deliver. The harder discipline here is deciding what doesn’t get resourced. Most L&D strategies fail not because the chosen initiatives were wrong but because there were too many of them.
Performance is the phase that gets designed last and should be designed first. By the time most teams think about measurement, the programs are already running and the only data available is what the LMS produces – the standard completions, satisfaction scores, assessment pass rates. That data doesn’t tell a business anything it needs to know. The right measures – whether capabilities actually changed, whether the business saw a result – have to be defined when the Objectives are written, because that’s when you still know what you were trying to achieve.
When the four phases are done honestly, the Strategy on a Page almost writes itself. The Situation work surfaces the constraints and the real business context. The Objectives work forces the hard conversation about which capabilities actually need to change and to what standard — which means the four strategic focus points on the page already have targets behind them, not aspirations. What most teams spend weeks negotiating in a strategy offsite has already been worked through. The one-page document stops being a formatting exercise and becomes a record of decisions that were actually made.
That’s why the two sit together in our practice. The SOAP Model is how you do the thinking. The Strategy on a Page is what you have to show for it.
Learning leaders we work with have come back to us with a version of the same observation: what they need is something that doesn’t have to be rebuilt every time someone new arrives, every time priorities shift, or every time the business asks more of the function. One director described arriving at every new organization to find no record of the original thinking behind existing programs – why they were built, what they were meant to solve. The strategy got reconstructed from memory and intuition instead. That’s a lot of organizational energy spent on work that should already be done. A consistent process is how you stop doing that.
The question of where to start has an answer. This is ours.
If you’re curious about this approach, book some time with us.
