A few weeks ago I was presenting Predictive Evaluation at ISPI’s annual Performance Improvement Conference. During my session we were talking about establishing the Success Gate for Intention Goals. Thought this would be a great topic for a blog – so here you go.

An Intention Goals Success Gate is the percentage of goals written by participants that are judged as matching the goals created when you predicted training’s values. For example, if an Intention Goals Success Gate is set at 90% and 50 goals are authored by participants, then the 90% success gate requires 45 of those goals be judged as acceptable (as matching the predicted Intention Goals).

Establishing an Intention Goals Success Gate is not difficult. Sometimes you, the evaluator, will nominate a percentage based on experience with the type of training being delivered. In other cases it is set by the program sponsors or the Steering Committee. I usually recommend that the success gate be set high, such as 90%. Steering Committees ask, why so high? My rationale is right goals lead to an increased adoption level and I want to maximize training’s adoption thus resulting in maximum value gained. Another way to think about it is to consider training to be a factory producing highly skilled workers. What defect rate does the company expect from it real factories? The answer is as close to zero as possible. We know that we are dealing with people and not widgets but concept is the same. I want as many participants planning to do the right thing as possible. Taking that into mind, the most common Intention Goal Success Gate is 90%.

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