Most leadership and performance initiatives ultimately fail for at least one simple reason:
they stop short.
Workshops spark inspiration. There are a ton of great programs. People show up, engage, take notes. For a moment, the energy is real.
Then the noise of the business – and life – returns.
Deadlines, meetings, re-orgs, non-stop demands from every direction. And slowly, almost invisibly, new skills give way to familiar behaviour. Six months later, it’s hard to point to what actually changed.
It’s not that leaders don’t care. Or the content isn’t good. It’s that the system around them isn’t designed to drive real change or sustain performance.
At I.Liv, we’ve been working on that problem:
How do you move beyond “great session” feedback to measurable, lasting behavior change and real business results?
Fundamentally we recognize that performance is not a one-off event, thus we don’t look at performance capability development as a one-off either. We think of it as a simple, powerful performance loop:
LEARN – ACTION – CONNECT + SUSTAIN
This 5-part series is about why that loop matters, how it works in the real world, and what it takes to operationalize it.
Why Most Leadership Investments Stall Out: The Knowing–Doing Gap
The problem isn’t a lack of content. Most organizations already run leadership programs that are smart, well-intentioned, and often even inspiring.
The problem is the Knowing–Doing gap: what people understand in a workshop versus what actually changes in their day-to-day behavior.
Our data – and decades of research – tell a consistent story:
- Without community and reinforcement, only about 10% of people successfully build new habits after learning something new.
- That aligns with the often-cited stat that roughly 88% of learning initiatives fail to deliver real results. Harvard Business Review reports that despite companies spending hundreds of billions on L&D, only 12% of employees apply new skills from training on the job, and a McKinsey survey found just 25% believe training measurably improves performance.
With a system that intentionally integrates LEARN–ACTION–CONNECT, a living loop where people are learning with and from each other, while acting in their real context, we see that number jump closer to 70%.
That’s a huge shift: from “some people applied a few ideas” to “most people changed something meaningful in how they think, live or work.”
And it brings us right back to where we started: most initiatives stop short.
They stop at knowing – more content, more information, clever, inspiring ideas. The real lift is in applying that to work and life: changing habits and behaviour. Too often, that heavy lift is left up to the individual, to chance, to hope.
Hope managers will coach.
Hope people will keep practicing.
Hope the community will keep itself alive.
Hope is not a strategy.
If you want to see consistent, measurable change in how work gets done, you need an intentional design for all four parts of the loop – and always in line with the business outcomes.
The LEARN–ACTION–CONNECT + SUSTAIN Model
Performance development behaves much more like a loop than an event:
- You LEARN something (hopefully) relevant.
- You put it into ACTION in the messiness of real world.
- You CONNECT with others to compare notes, troubleshoot, and refine – building authentic bonds and alignment in the process.
- You SUSTAIN what works and ADAPT as the context shifts.
On repeat.
Why SUSTAIN Is Non-Negotiable
Even when LEARN–ACTION–CONNECT is working well, the context around your people is constantly shifting. You can’t treat performance and leadership like something you “fix” once and then move on.
SUSTAIN is about staying aligned with three realities:
- External environment shifts. Markets move. Technology changes. New regulations land. Headwinds and tailwinds show up that no one planned for. What worked last quarter may not be enough for what’s coming next.
- Evolving business objectives. Strategies pivot. New priorities emerge. Different capabilities become critical. If your approach to performance doesn’t keep pace with where the business is going, even well-built programs drift out of relevance.
- Real life needs. People’s lives change. Roles, responsibilities, energy, and capacity all move through different seasons. Sustaining performance means creating space for people to navigate those shifts without losing momentum or burning out.
SUSTAIN is the commitment to keep connecting those three – environment, business, and life – back to how people actually work and lead every day.
What This 5-Part Series Will Cover
In this series, we want to focus on real-world examples, not just theory.
Together with Daniel Shuman, we’ll bring you three real-world SUSTAIN initiatives in action – each with genuine engagement and real results behind them. These are not I.Liv case studies; they’re examples of what happens when sustainment is taken seriously and designed well.
For each example, we’ll look at:
- The need – the specific challenge, gap, or opportunity the organization was facing.
- The design – how sustainment was built in from the start (structures, rhythms, community, support), not bolted on at the end.
- The experience – what it actually felt like for the people involved, and how they stayed engaged over time.
- The ROI – the impact on both people and the business: engagement, behavior change, and measurable outcomes.
Then, in the fifth and final part, we’ll step back and unpack what it actually takes to own and operationalize SUSTAIN as a capability inside your organization – beyond any single program or initiative.
If you’re responsible for leadership, performance, or talent – and you’re tired of initiatives that look good in a slide deck but struggle to show up in real life or in the numbers – this series is designed for you.