The theme of this month’s newsletter, Community-Centered Workforce Systems and Collaboration, clearly has a positive underpinning. The theme suggests that when workforce development partners come together with good intentions, the desired program results will certainly follow. All that is necessary for success is the goodwill and engagement among collaborators working toward a common goal.
As much as we’d like to believe this statement to be true, program success is in fact not guaranteed by partner collaboration alone. Experience tells us a somewhat different and sobering story. In spite of our best efforts, not all programs achieve their goals or may be successful for the short term and disappear after being implemented. The truth is that failure occurs more often than we’d like to admit. Program failure was the focus of an influential article that appeared some time ago in the Harvard Business Review by Beer, Eisenstat and Spector. The authors made clear what most practitioners already knew but weren’t openly saying: In spite of everyone’s best efforts, more often than not things don’t turn out as planned.
I became intrigued with the failure of change in early 2000, and considered models for institutionalizing change, recognizing failure as a possibility but also seeks to proactively avoid it to the extent possible. Institutionalizing change identifies what actions should be taken to sustain the change and have it become part of the everyday fabric and culture of an organization. The ultimate definition of program success is its long-term adoption. I’ve shared a reference (Jacobs, 2002) for those interested in learning more about my thinking on the topic.
Around this time as well, organizational commitment became fashionable to discuss in the organizational change literature. Commitment presumes that successful change depends simply on people doing what they proclaim they will do, without realizing that commitment is complicated by its relationship with two other notions: People should first have the ability to perform, which allows them next to truthfully state their capacity to perform when called upon. Thus, commitment is dependent upon an individual’s ability and self-efficacy.
I first observed the interactions among ability, self-efficacy, and commitment some years ago when observing a supposedly well-planned program to implement Statistical Process Control (SPC) in a GM plant. Following the program, management expected workers would begin to chart the variability of production quality, which was part of a broader employee involvement effort. As delivered, the SPC program was more awareness building in its objectives, not skill building and the scenario afterwards was disconcerting for everyone involved. Workers wanted to tackle SPC but lacked the knowledge and skills to carry out an SPC study. And management interpreted their inaction as representing a lack of support from local union leadership, accusing them of not being committed to quality. A better understanding upfront of how to institutionalize the change expected of workers, and managers as well, would have done much to ensure success.
Unfortunately, we’re seeing the same cycle of failure repeat itself today. Fortune magazine recently reported a recent MIT study showing that a distressing 95 percent of generative AI pilot projects in organizations fail to achieve their intended results. In spite of everyone’s best efforts otherwise and sizeable financial investments, most AI projects stall out due to poor integration and a lack of clear strategic focus. . https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
Readers who are responsible for planning and managing workforce development projects can no doubt relate to the reasons given for the failure of AI projects. The reasons hold true across the spectrum efforts to implement change.
Program failure for workforce development is particularly distressing because of the stakes involved. For one thing, communities depend on workforce development programs, such as youth apprenticeships, as a societal response to changing economic and social conditions. Regardless, not all workforce development programs become successfully institutionalized, relying on key individuals to maintain their momentum.
Here are some points to consider when collaborators recognize that institutionalizing their workforce development programs is the goal:
- Articulate the external critical events that the community faces, such as when a major employer recognizes changing market demand requires making different products, that prompt the need for the partners to come together.
- Consider the collaboration as a partnership, recognizing that each partner – employers, agencies, and schools – have their own respective goals to achieve, but they cannot achieve them without working with the others.
- Make each partner’s goals and expected outcomes explicit upfront, which helps to inform the planning process and reduce surprises and disappointments at the end.
- Envision in clear terms the future state – what the program seeks to achieve and how each partner will benefit from the future state.
- Keep in mind that program design is a process and the process results in a program of some kind, suggesting that both the process and the product has sets of inputs, processes, outputs, and feedback mechanisms to be recognized and addressed.
- Identify enroute milestones, around which the partners can share what is happening from their respective perspectives.
- Recognize that project goals aren’t immutable and may require adjustments along the way, based on what might be occurring or unanticipated events.
- Behavioral change depends on addressing the three layers of development: People must acquire the attitudes, knowledge, and skills first (ability), before they can state the possibility of using the information (self-efficacy), and finally to express in words and actions (commitment).
This is not an exhaustive list, just a beginning, and most wise workforce development collaborations likely include these points already. Even so, each point listed keeps in mind actions that would contribute toward long-term adoption.
In this sense, I am reminded of the following interaction when developing a structured on the-job training program for new-hire engineers for the Kuwait National Petroleum Company. This was a relatively large project that occurred over several years, and I’ve given a reference to learn more about the project. At the beginning of the project, a senior manager asked me the following question: What does success look like? In response, I responded by sharing that success could be defined by the expected reduced learning times and more effective work outcomes. But I remember also saying that program success could be defined by when the current group of new-hire engineers are trained using S-OJT and, over time, some of them become sufficiently experienced to become S-OJT trainers themselves, ready to deliver S-OJT to the next generation of new-hire engineers. When the second generation of S-OJT trainers emerges, then the company can say that the program was truly a success, as it has become the expected way of developing new-hire engineers.
By the way, the current CEO is Ms. Wadha Ahmad Al-Khateeb https://www.knpc.com/en/about-us/governance/knpc-directory was one of the first trainees of the program, later becoming an S-OJT trainer, before heading into a leadership role.
Many readers can likely relate to my story as they as well have observed one-time apprentices graduate and eventually become mentors to the next generation of apprentices, and so on. These are the outcomes to celebrate and suggest what I believe is a true measure of program success.
Admittedly, program success can be impacted by unforeseen external events beyond our control. But program success can be managed, and success seems most impactful when partners work towards institutionalizing the program for the long term.
References
Beer, M., Eisenstat, R. and Spector, B. (1990), "Why change programs don't produce
change", Harvard Business Review, 6, (68), 158-66.
Jacobs, R. L. (2002). Institutionalizing organizational change through cascade training. Journal of European Industrial Training, 26, 2-4.
Jacobs, R.L., and Bu-Rahmah, M. (2012). Developing employee expertise through structured on-the-job training (S-OJT): An introduction to this training approach and the KNPC experience. Industrial and Commercial Training, 2.
