Your project training is hitting only 10% of learner needs

I've led organizational change for 7 separate Workday deployments spanning every HCM module (Core HR, Recruiting, Talent Management, Benefits Administration, Payroll, Time Tracking and Absence, and Workforce Planning and Analytics) as well as Finance and Procurement, across implementations in nearly 20 countries. One of the clearest patterns across all of them: training plans are dramatically under-designed.

Most organizations plan their project training the same way: schedule sessions, build job aids, document the process, and call it done.

This approach reaches roughly 10 percent of how adults actually learn. That's not a typo. And it's not a knock on your training team.

It's a reflection of how learning actually works, and most project plans are designed around the 10 percent, leaving the other 90 percent to chance. This is where behavioral science can help you close the gap.

The 70:20:10 model Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger's research, documented in The Career Architect Development Planner, established what's now widely known as the 70:20:10 model of adult learning:

• 70 percent of learning comes from challenging on-the-job experiences: doing the work, navigating real problems, making decisions under pressure
• 20 percent comes from relationship-based learning: peer exchange, coaching, collaborative problem-solving
• 10 percent comes from formal education and training: courses, documentation, structured sessions 

In a technology deployment, the project itself handles most of the 70 percent: testing phases, configuration walkthroughs, and parallel runs. These are learning experiences by design, and they're partially covered.

This leaves the 20 percent of relationship-based learning. This is the highest-leverage opportunity most project teams miss entirely.

What relationship-based learning actually looks like

Relationship-based learning has a few defining characteristics. It's interactive and collaborative — an equal exchange, not a one-way transfer. It's less structured, moving at the pace the learners need. It builds connection: when people learn together, they develop empathy and confidence through the experience of working alongside each other. And it creates accountability. You can't disappear when a learning partner is counting on you.

In a technology deployment, this plays out through formats that don't always look like "training" but are doing the most important learning work:

Informal demos. Team members lead brief, interactive walkthroughs of the system. Not polished presentations, but real conversations with real questions. This builds the presenter's fluency while creating transparency across the team. Think lunch-and-learn or fireside chat format.  Demos are the most efficient way to build this kind of learning directly into a project.

Peer chat groups. Fast answers from colleagues keep people working rather than frustrated. Breaking groups out by topic or workstream keeps it focused. This is often where the most practical knowledge-sharing happens, and it's nearly free to set up.

Daily standups post go-live. A 30-minute meeting in the days after launch resolves issues quickly and normalizes the experience of figuring things out together. People discover they're not alone in their questions. Colleagues who've already solved something get to teach, which builds their confidence while helping others. This is 70:20:10 in action. 

A centralized help desk. Even a shared email inbox works, as long as it's clearly communicated as the single point of contact and responds promptly. The patterns in incoming questions are also valuable: they tell you where your communication and training missed, and give you material for follow-up teach-outs or FAQ development.

What this means for you as a leader

The 20 percent doesn't manage itself. Relationship-based learning requires intentional design. Someone has to create the structures. But these structures are far lower-cost than formal training, and their ROI is higher because they build something that outlasts the project: a team that has learned to rely on each other and work through change together. Five real deployments show what it looks like when a team builds this capability.

That's not just a project outcome. It's an organizational capability. And it's exactly what the changecapable approach is designed to develop through a behavioral science lens that makes the difference between adoption that sticks and adoption that flops.

This post was updated in May 2026 to include the full 70:20:10 model citation and reframes the content for senior leaders overseeing deployment training strategy. It also reflects a meaningful shift in the learning environment: hybrid and distributed work have made intentional relationship-based learning design significantly more critical. The organic peer learning that used to happen in hallways now requires deliberate structure.

Ready to go deeper?

Start with Inspired by Fear: Becoming a Courageous Change Leader.

And if you're ready to build this capability systematically across your leadership team, explore The changecapable Leadership Program.

Related reading

• How to improve transformation execution: 5 proven strategies--see Case Study 3 for a detailed example of on-the-job learning built into a Workday deployment
• The power of showing the system being built. Demos as the most effective form of relationship-based learning in a deployment
• What's different about Workday that changes your change management — how Workday's structure creates the conditions for this kind of learning
• The Influence Stack: Tthe change leadership maturation process