A major talking point about the Leicester success is how little the team cost compared with the other teams around them in the league.  The table below shows the cost of Leicester and the other teams:

Club	Spend
Manchester City	£443m
Manchester United	£421m
Chelsea	£322m
Liverpool	£272m
Arsenal	£241m
Tottenham	£183m
Leicester	£57m

The difference between the top 6 teams and Leicester for spend is tangible.  For example Manchester City spent 7.8 times the amount of money on their team last season.  In fact out of 20 teams in the Premier League, Leicester were 17th on the list in terms of spend whereas the table above shows the top 6 teams.  So what can we take from this?

Spending money is no guarantee of success.  All to often in L&D it is about creating a 'shiny' new training programme to meet the needs of the business the question has to be...do you need a programme with all the bells and whistles to achieve the business goals?  or even, do we already have something in our catalog that can serve the same purpose?

Leicester have managed with minimal investment and working with what they had available in the squad.  They have perfected their winning strategy by understanding what skills their current players have and how best to utilise this resource to achieve their goals.

Use a strategy to match your strengths

One of the contributing factors to Leicesters success relates to the strategy employed over the course of a season.  In very basic terms the strategy revolved around:

1.  Concede as few goals as possible

2.  Score on the counter attack

The first strategy may seem straight forward however implementation is something entirely different.  Leicester conceded the 4th lowest number of goals throughout the season but the more impressive figure is that in 42% of their games they did not concede a single goal.  Couple this with the fact that they only lost 3 games all season shows that they were great at keeping goals out and even when they did concede they were getting goals of their own to make up for it.  In actual fact it was not until the later half of the season where they actually started to achieve clean sheets en mass.  Prior to Christmas they had conceded 24 goals.  Since Christmas they have only conceded 10.  Simply by focusing on improving defense with an already relatively competent back four they have now set records for the number of consecutive clean sheets.


With regards to the second strategy, they have made best use of the speed they have upfront.  Jamie Vardy has just won a player of the year award for his contribution to this years campaign.  The key to his success is largely based upon his rapid pace and ability to get in behind the defense of the opposition.  This suits the counter attacking style of play to a tee and Vardy's 22 goals confirm this.  He is also partnered with Riyad Mahrez with 22 goals and 11 assists of his own which further adds to the counter attacking capability.

The learning here is that an L&D function should take the time to understand what it is doing well and play to it's strengths.  For example if you have a LMS that is great at delivering results in some areas and not in others, consider focusing your attention and strategy around making all content  delivered via that LMS as good as it can be.  Perhaps even consider using the LMS as a method for communicating other business information and really make it an integral part of the learners daily process.  What ever your strategy, aligning it to your strengths rather than starting from scratch on your deficiencies may produce faster business results.

Maintain consistency when you are successful

Leicesters approach this season could be summed up by the tried and tested phrase of "it isn't broke, don't fix it!".  In his previous stint as manager at Chelsea, Claudio Ranieri was nicknamed "The Tinkerer" for his constant changing of the starting squad.  This year he has changed his squad less than any other team in the league.  This is partly down to the consistent high performance of the team as well as the limited depth of talent in the squad compared to the larger teams.  However the fact remains that Leicester have been one of if not the most consistent team this season.  This consistency has meant that positive feelings of winning as well as training day activity is built upon week on week with largely the same number of players.  This has lead to all players having a greater understanding of the others in the team and what they are collectively trying to achieve either that game or across the season.

Building on my previous hypothetical example regarding LMS systems, if you are having success with a specific platform then it would be wise to stick to one platform and perfect it.  All too often I have seen learning communities with a plethora of different LMS's, portals, hubs, etc to navigate in order to access learning.  Not only is this inefficient from a maintenance perspective, the learning experience becomes fragmented and arduous.  One platform would provide a single point of access for all learning as well as consistent messaging and process for learning.

The final piece of learning relates to the power of belief.  At Christmas many pundits were stating that Leicester wouldn't win the league despite being top of the table at that point of the year.  The only people that really truly believed they could were the team themselves.  Now at the end of the season so much can be said about how important it is to believe that you can achieve something, even when others say you cant.  I have observed, over a number of years, that change or adoption of new methodology can be hampered by a variety of limiting beliefs.  They may be similar to some of the following:

• • We don't have the budget
• • The learning community are too busy to learn something new
• • It will take too long to change
• • What about or existing processes
• • The transition will be too difficult

Over the following days and weeks there will be countless articles and posts written about Leicesters miracle title run.  In each of these articles there will be new analysis and insight into how the impossible was made possible.  Perhaps the final point is a simple one.  This year Leicester were a great example of how the end product can be greater than the sum of its parts.  I heard a pundit describe the team as having not just one player who had a had a great season but as a team that had all its players have a great season.  At the end of the day it would seem that hard work, dedication and a commitment to a common goal really are a recipe for success.

Outside of work, people use and engage with social media platforms on a daily basis for personal learning. For many, particularly those existing Gen Y employees, and the Post-Millennials just starting out in the workplace, it’s second nature to use these platforms as a way of learning and accessing knowledge. The world of learning and development (L&D), at least from a provider point of view, has embraced this trend. There are now several companies in the market that have developed platforms to support social learning in the workplace. But while many L&D departments have followed their lead and welcomed this shift in learning, not everyone is where they need to be.

•  Engaged employees who learn ‘at the point of need’
•  Easier access to best practice processes
•  Recognised subject matter experts for your community
•  An empowered learning community — employees in control of their own learning journey

Examples of Success

From our experience and through our support we can achieve the following with your social communities:
•  34% more engagement
•  133% more likely to reduce silos
•  80% increased chance of sharing best practice across the business

Vested Interests

The key point about the Conspiracy of Convenience is that all three parties have a vested interest in pushing up the cost of training:

· Business area managers know that training is a safe option. They won’t be criticised for asking for training and, by doing so, they are seen to be working to solve a problem. Sure, training costs money, but it lets you ‘outsource’ solutions to problems – that’s much easier than other solutions like redefining job roles and processes, or changing obstructive organisational structures. Even if training doesn’t solve the problem, the link between training and business improvement is ambiguous, there won’t be any comeback. So business unit managers are keen to do training.

· The L&D department exists to serve the business. It’s in their interests to find training solutions on request, and the faster the better, to provide a good service to their internal clients. It is not in L&D’s interest to challenge a business unit about their choice of training (if they do, the business will source training direct from a third party in future and cut out L&D altogether). It’s much easier to give them the answer they want, ASAP, and without asking difficult questions like ‘what’s the business problem are you trying to solve?’

· Training delivery teams have a vested interest in developing and delivering as much training as they can. To internal teams it represents job security. To external companies it represents vital revenue. There’s no criticism of the quality of the training here, but we cannot deny the underlying commercial reality that leads delivery teams to provide more training, not less.

All three parties work on the overriding assumption that training is A Good Thing and the more training, the better it will be. It’s such a deeply-held assumption that we don’t even bother to say it, leave alone question it. For each stakeholder the most convenient outcome is to encourage training, but together it happens in a way that leads to wasteful training spend.

Finally, none of the stakeholders have much interest in asking the question ‘how will this training improve the performance problem?’

Individually, each party seeks to be cost-efficient. I’m not suggesting any malevolence here – quite the opposite – everyone genuinely wants a good outcome. But together their need to be seen to be doing something constructive, to find a quick solution, or their subconscious self-interest, all conspire to generate a solution that may be ill-thought-out, unable to solve the problem at hand and a lot more expensive than it needs to be.

Break the conspiracy – Needs Analysis

To avoid this situation, you need to break the conspiracy. You need something outside of the commissioning triangle of business manager / L&D / delivery team. It needs to be done by someone capable of challenging the presumed need and the solution. Needs Analysis (and this may also be called Performance Consulting) is one answer.

There’s no ‘T’ in Needs Analysis

Notice I deliberately do not say ‘Training’ Needs Analysis because that presumes the answer is training (even though others may already have decided it is). Needs Analysis looks at the ‘need’ in the business or performance sense. It is a brief and high level assessment which asks two main questions:

1. How is the problem affecting business performance?

2. What sorts of interventions would reduce or resolve that problem?


Needs analysis should consider the presumed solution and challenge that approach. In my experience there is always a presumed solution, often about right, but rarely well-thought-through and usually missing important details:

· What other approaches would improve the chances/extent of success?

· What is missing/overlooked from the presumed solution in order to ensure a good outcome

Benefits and Challenges

Huge benefits may come from focusing onto the root cause of a problem rather than simply addressing the symptoms. My best example from years ago involved a request for mass training on the responsible use of email: this was completely avoided by a technical solution, restricting access to the organisation’s global address lists.

Similarly, spotting what’s missing from a solution will transform outcomes. For example, the embedding of training is invariably overlooked or under-resourced and falls down the crack: business managers conveniently assume behaviours change forever after 3 hours in a classroom; and L&D see embedding as the business’ responsibility.

Breaking the Conspiracy of Convenience will not always be welcomed, because it makes it much less convenient for those involved in the cycle! Needs Analysis may be seen as slowing the process down when all the parties want to get to some shiny new content. It asks difficult questions about business problems which we’d rather not acknowledge. Traditionally it would fall in the remit of L&D, but in today’s world of stripped-back L&D, the resources (and frankly the skills) are just not there.

However, the wider business ought to welcome rapid and insightful Needs Analysis. It’s an important tool for any L&D team, to break the Conspiracy of Convenience and get learning properly focused on where it makes a difference.