An Intention Evaluation addresses the following question: Are participant goals and beliefs upon course completion aligned with desired goals? This means that you incorporate goal planning into the course and have participants write their own goals. A way to do this is to provide the goal planning sheet in the Participant Notes and provide notes for the Facilitator, explaining the purpose of the activity, how to introduce it, how much time to allocate, and criteria for acceptable action items. Make sure that you allocate time at the end of the program to write goals. As a rule of thumb, participants need 15-30 minutes to write two goals. In some cases more time is required than this. Participants who are technical workers rather than knowledge workers may take longer. They may experience difficulty articulating on paper what they want to write and need the facilitator to help them.

What constitutes a good goal? A correctly written goal meets the three criteria of what I call the SOS+D model:

• S pecific – The goal is free of ambiguity and it is clear what the participant will be doing.
• O bservable – Others will be able to see the leaner doing this.
• S ignificant – The implementation of the goal will make a real difference to the participant, their team, and the company.

*** and the goals must be ***

• D irectly related – The goal flows out of the course content.

Here is an example of an SOS goal from a Business Acumen course.