What you can commission · 03 of 04

Learning, Training & Capability Transfer

Building the capability to run the impact function without us — designed so it survives our leaving.

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What it is

Building your people's ability to do the work themselves. Training, coaching, accompaniment, and the tools and templates your team will still be using in two years. The success condition is that you stop needing us for it.

Duration
4–12 weeks, longer where we work alongside you
Starts from
A capability baseline against the tasks your team must own
Who it is for
Impact, MEL and programme teams who are dependent on external support for work that recurs
Delivered by
Whitney van Schyndel, facilitating; specialists brought in for technical modules

When you need it

  • The gap is skill rather than evidence or structure.
  • You are dependent on external support for work that recurs.
  • An operating model has been designed and the people who must run it have not been equipped to.
  • Impact literacy is uneven — strong in the impact team, thin in the leadership that has to act on their work.
  • Key-person risk: one person holds the capability and the organisation would lose it with them.

What is in scope

  • MEL and evidence skills for impact teams — design, instruments, analysis, synthesis.
  • Impact literacy for leadership and boards — how to interrogate impact evidence and what to ask of it. Frequently the higher-leverage half.
  • Accompaniment — working alongside your team on live work rather than in a training room, which is where transfer actually happens.
  • Tools, templates and playbooks built on your material, not generic examples.
  • Train-the-trainer where the capability needs to spread beyond the people we can reach directly.

How it runs

Four to twelve weeks for a defined programme; longer where accompaniment is the main mode. Almost always better attached to live work than delivered as a standalone course.

What you receive

  1. A capability baseline against the specific tasks your team must own unaided
  2. The programme itself — workshops, coaching, or accompaniment on live work
  3. Tools, templates and playbooks built on your own material
  4. A facilitator pack where the capability needs to spread beyond the people we reach
  5. A re-measure at close, against the same baseline
  6. A named handover date, agreed before we start

What we need from you

  • Protected time. Capability building delivered into the gaps of a full week produces attendance, not capability.
  • Live work to practise on — the transfer happens on real deliverables, not exercises.
  • A line manager who will hold the new practice in place after we leave.
  • Honesty about the starting point; the baseline is more useful than a flattering one.

Where this has been done

The BUSY engagement included the capability side — the minimum viable capability an organisation needs before an operating model can be run internally. See the case studies.

The honest limit

Capability decays fast when there is nothing to apply it to. Training people to operate a system that does not exist — no forum requiring the output, no role accountable for it — produces a competent team, twelve months of drift, and a conclusion that the training was poor. It usually was not. If the operating layer is missing, build that first or build it alongside; do not buy this on its own and expect it to hold.

Questions we get asked

Is this classroom training?

Rarely, and rarely by choice. Transfer happens when people apply a skill to live work with someone alongside them, not when they attend a session about it. We use workshops where a shared foundation is genuinely needed, then move to accompaniment on real deliverables as quickly as possible.

How do you know it worked?

Where it is worth the effort, we take a capability baseline at the start and re-measure at the end, against the specific tasks the team must be able to perform unaided. The test is not satisfaction scores — it is whether the next piece of work gets done without us.

What if our team has no time for this?

Then it will not work, and that is worth confronting before spending the budget. Capability building requires protected time; delivered into the gaps of an already-full week, it produces attendance rather than capability. If time cannot be protected, a different service is the better purchase.

How to start

  1. Name the tasksWhat should your team be able to do unaided in twelve months that they cannot do today?
  2. A capability baselineShort and specific, against those tasks. It sets the target and the measure at the same time.
  3. A written scope and feeProgramme shape, contact hours, the live work it attaches to, and the handover date.

The other three

All four run on the same underlying architecture — the Integrated Impact Operating Model, which we designed and published.