I sit at my desk enjoying the satisfaction of having just completed a new-hire training program for Bitloom’s sales team. The feeling does not last long. A Slack message from my manager appears: he has just left a meeting with senior leadership, and they are demanding that we develop a communication-skills training program to address two major concerns: delayed customer support response times and poor service quality. The request is clearly a high priority, and leadership appears convinced that inadequate communication skills are causing both problems. However, my responsibility as the Lead Learning Designer is not simply to deliver the requested training, but to determine whether it will address the actual performance need. Christensen’s Performance Improvement Process Model emphasizes that performance-improvement work should begin by verifying the need rather than immediately accepting a proposed intervention. Similarly, Stefaniak explains that statements such as “we need training” d...