How To Prove The Business Case Of L&D With Sian Knott

You started your early career at Amazon in logistics. From a learning and development perspective, how has that experience shaped the way you approach your work today?

Yeah, that’s correct. I didn’t actually come up through learning and development. I came through operations, specifically logistics at Amazon. Honestly, that has really shaped how I approach training.

In operations, you are obsessed with metrics like throughput, quality, safety, and cost. Nobody really cares how good the training feels unless performance improves as a result. That was something I learned quickly.

I’ve carried that forward into my approach today. With any L&D intervention that I create, it has to be linked to solving a real business problem. It has to work within the workflow of the job people are doing, and it has to stand up to operational scrutiny.

Because of that, I don’t start with content. I start with questions back to the operation. What is the performance gap? What is actually getting in the way? And sometimes, learning isn’t the answer at all.

What are some examples where learning isn’t actually the right solution?

It could be a process issue that needs to be addressed rather than a learning issue. There might be a problem with technology, or a specific process within the operation that needs to be examined and fixed before anything else.

Only once that gap is properly identified and the process itself has been fixed do you then move to training people on how to use the improved process. That sequencing is really important.

A lot of it comes down to digging into what the training request actually is. As an L&D function, we used to receive an average of between 500 and 600 training requests per year at Amazon just for content creation. In reality, it was probably more than that. Those were simply the ones we ended up delivering. The total number of requests coming through was likely double.

When you sit down with the requester, the real work is in digging into the root cause. Is this genuinely a training gap? Is it a skill versus will issue? Is it a process problem? There are many different scenarios where training or learning is not going to solve the problem.

You have to be comfortable having those conversations with operations and saying no and pushing back on work. It’s not as though other work isn’t going to come through. But if you focus on quality over quantity, you quickly build a stronger reputation and more credibility.

That leads to an important challenge. Many L&D teams struggle to push back when leaders come with a predefined solution like training. What best practices would you recommend?

It happens all the time. A leader will come to you and say, “We’ve got a problem,” and then immediately follow it with, “Can you build me some training?”

The risk in that situation is that L&D becomes an order taker instead of a strategic partner. That’s where the shift needs to happen. L&D should be a strategic partner. We should be sitting at the same table as operations and the wider organisation, having those conversations.

The way to push back is not to say no outright, but to reframe the conversation. You ask questions like: what is the actual problem we’re trying to solve? What does success look like in terms of business metrics? What are people doing today, and how do you need them to do things differently tomorrow?

Through those questions and deeper exploration, you often uncover that the issue is actually a process issue, a clarity issue, or perhaps a leadership capability issue. It’s not necessarily a knowledge gap.

When you position it like that, you are speaking their language. You move from being a training delivery partner to owning performance outcomes. That’s what leaders care about, and that’s what ultimately helps you earn a seat at the table.

A regular insight I’m getting from the L&D professionals I’m talking to is that there are big differences between training and learning and development. I believe the former is a short term solution and the beginning of something, whereas the latter is a life long journey.

How do you distinguish between training and learning and development?

I completely agree with your perspective. For me, training is an event, whereas L&D is a system. Training is finite. It is content-focused and often reactive to the requests that come in. L&D, on the other hand, is a continuous system. It’s focused on behaviour and performance, and it is embedded in how the company actually operates. It doesn’t sit outside of it.

If you frame it simply, training is “we delivered a workshop,” whereas L&D is “we changed how managers lead and we can prove it.”

Another insight that has come up from my previous conversations with L&D teams is that there needs to be a balance between quantitative and qualitative data to prove that a programme is effective. Yet so many companies seem only to focus on activity metrics like completion rates. 

What should they be measuring instead to demonstrate real impact?

This is something that genuinely excites me and has been a major focus of my career over the last several years to figure out how to tie L&D to ROI and business impact.

Completion rates and feedback scores are easy to measure, and they do have their place, but they are not particularly meaningful. What I focus on instead is behaviour change such as whether a manager is actually doing something differently as a result of the learning. I also look at operational metrics. Are we seeing shifts in performance, quality, safety, cost, or engagement? It’s also important to look at leading indicators, not just lagging outcomes.

In my previous work, we delivered millions in operational impact annually through improvements in manager capability. We reduced costs through training optimisation, sustained compliance at scale in complex, high-risk environments, and saw double-digit improvements in areas like attrition and manager preparedness.

The key point is that we didn’t report those numbers in isolation. We tied them directly to the metrics the organisation cared about: faster productivity, increased throughput, consistency across sites, reduced labour costs, and stronger frontline leadership capability.

That shifts the conversation from “how many people completed this training” to “what performance and cost outcomes did we unlock.” Ultimately, that is how the business measures success.

When you start focusing on those areas, you move into a position where, as an L&D leader, you are operating alongside senior leadership in driving real impact and change across the company. You are speaking their language, which helps you get buy-in much more quickly.

What are your thoughts on e-learning, especially since its growth during COVID? Do you believe it’s become oversaturated or that it’s useful in the right context?

I think you’re right to point to COVID as a major shift. I remember that period at Amazon, where we had to move everything from in-person delivery to online. It was an incredibly intense period in my career.

I do think e-learning is massively overused. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. It’s brilliant for knowledge transfer, standardisation, and scalability, especially when you’re supporting a large business. At Amazon, we were supporting around 22,000 employees on average. In my previous role, I used e-learning extensively for things like knowledge checks, refresher training, and simple, task-based training.

However, it is weak when it comes to behaviour change, leadership development, and complex decision-making. The mistake organisations make is using e-learning for everything because it is efficient and low cost compared to in-person workshops or more advanced solutions like AI-driven learning.

The real question should always be: what is the simplest, most effective intervention for this particular problem? Sometimes the answer is e-learning, but often it isn’t.

What mindset shifts are needed for L&D professionals to focus more on behaviour change?

If you’re not thinking about behaviour change, you’re not really doing L&D. You’re doing content production. That might sound harsh, but at its core, our role is to help people do something differently and sustain that change over time.

That means you need to understand habits, the environment people operate in, reinforcement mechanisms, and social dynamics. Behaviour doesn’t change because someone attended a course, a workshop, or completed an e-learning module. It changes when the system around them supports those new ways of working.

What role do you think AI will play in L&D?

AI is fundamentally going to reshape L&D, but not in the way people often assume. It’s not just about faster content creation and that is probably the least interesting aspect. The real shift will be in areas like hyper-personalised learning paths, skills-based matching, real-time performance support, and removing friction from accessing knowledge.

Another key area is the aggregation of data and the ability to predict trends, which will help us better understand skills gaps and knowledge transfer needs. Historically, L&D has struggled with accessing and using data effectively, so this is a significant opportunity.

At the same time, AI will expose weak L&D practices. If your value is based on building courses, AI will replace that. But if your value lies in helping the business solve performance problems, then AI becomes an accelerator.

How do you approach evidence-based research in your work?

I do use it, but very intentionally. I draw on areas like behavioural science, habit formation, nudges, learning transfer research, spaced repetition, retrieval practice, and social learning theory.

At the same time, I’m very pragmatic. The goal is not to apply theory perfectly but to apply it in a way that works within real organisational environments, which are often messy, fast-paced, and constrained. So it’s about striking a balance between being intentional and being practical.

If you could change one or two things about the L&D industry, what would they be?

The first would be the obsession with content. I think we are over-indexed on designing programmes instead of solving problems. The second would be the lack of a commercial mindset. Too much L&D operates disconnected from the business it serves.

If we want to have a seat at the table, and I know I keep using that phrase, we need to speak the language of performance. We need to tie everything back to outcomes, and we need to be willing to say, “this is not a learning problem.”

How can L&D teams strengthen their internal brand and demonstrate their value?

The key is staying close to the business. You need to understand what is changing within the organisation and continuously test and iterate in real environments.

You also need to create time to think which involves engaging with research, new ideas, and different disciplines. For me, impact comes from doing the work, seeing what lands, what doesn’t, and continuously refining from there.

Before L&D and operations, I worked as a programme manager, and I think that design-build-test approach is really valuable. It helps you stay close to the business, evolve continuously, and remain part of the conversation.

Finally, how do you personally stay current and continue evolving in your work?

It comes back to staying close to the business. That means spending time with operations, sitting in on senior leadership meetings, and engaging with people who are actually facing problems on the shop floor.

Listening is absolutely key. In my previous role, I sat in a huge number of meetings, and more often than not, I wouldn’t speak. I wouldn’t play my “poker chip.” I was there to listen and understand. At Amazon, there was a phrase “the dog that’s not barking.” It refers to what you’re hearing in the background that isn’t being explicitly said.

People might be discussing something unrelated to L&D, but in my mind, I’m thinking about how that connects to future strategy i.e. what I need to build and what problems I need to solve through L&D interventions.

So for me, it’s about staying close to the business, continuously practicing through designing, building, testing, and iterating, and spending time researching new ideas, different disciplines, and advances in technology.