_{Written by: Bella Funck, Co-Founder & CEO}

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The Spark That Fades

I’ve been working with learning and development (L&D) and change management across the globe and industries since the early 2010s.

I really thought I was making change happen. I ran trainings where people left inspired and confident. You could feel it. The spark. The sense that something had shifted.

It looked like change. It felt like change. But it wasn’t.

Because when I followed up a few weeks later, the spark was gone, nothing had change. It really puzzled me. Why is this so? I went through dozens of evaluations and follow-up feedback from participants.

And that’s when I realized.

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When Learning Isn’t Enough

I was basically sending people off with new awareness, new knowledge and mindset and wished them good luck doing the hard part alone: changing their behavior.

Because people were returning to the same structures that had reinforced their old behaviors. So the old behavior returned too. No wonder nothing changed.

It’s like trying to keep a fire alive in the rain. The spark might be real, but the conditions don’t let it catch.

And the more I worked across organizations, the more I saw the same thing happening. And the data confirmed what I was seeing:
Studies show that only 12–20% of participants actually apply what they learn in their day-to-day work (Brinkerhoff, 2006; Harvard Business Review, 2019)

That’s not just frustrating. It represents a massive loss of time, money, and energy. Companies invest more than $340 billion globally in employee training and development  (Josh Bersin, 2024).

So I spent the last one and half decade trying to understand why and find ways to solve it.

And what I learned is this:

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Why Most Learning Initiatives Fall Short

We treat behavior problems as if they were only learning problems.

It’s easy to fall into this pattern. Someone isn’t doing what they’re supposed to? “Give them a course!” Need to implement a new way of working? “Send them an e-learning.” And are people actually changing their behavior? (And that’s assuming we even measure it, which we often don’t.) In most cases? Not really.

That doesn’t mean learning isn’t important. It is. It helps build individual factors like skills, confidence, emotion, and motivation, what people need to even begin changing.

But on its own? It’s not enough.

What I noticed often gets forgotten is the second half of the equation: the structures that either support change or kill it.

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The Missing Half: Structural factors

The structural factors are the processes, the resources, the tools, the norms and incentives that surround people. Whether managers check in. Whether there's time to practice. Whether new behaviors are modeled. Whether routines have changed. Whether people are rewarded for the right things.

Because here’s what the science tells us:

The most comprehensive meta-study to date on behavior change (Albarracín et al., 2024, Nature Reviews Psychology) shows that when we address both individual and structural factors, we are significantly more likely to create lasting change.

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The Courage to Shift How We Work

If you’ve been working in learning for some time, you’ve probably had similar reflections and realisations like me. And rather feel frustrated that your organisation don't yet share the same point of view. So here is what I think.

Now it’s time for us to have the courage to say: no more waste.

If we keep designing learning in isolation, without helping to change the structure people work in - we risk being part of the problem.

So this is our shift. That means making it clear for others that: We’re not just here to transfer knowledge. We’re here to design for change.

And I also believe this shift means reshaping how we see ourselves, and how others see us. We are not just learning designers. We are architects of behavior.

It also means helping our stakeholders, clients, and leaders understand what different solutions are actually likely to achieve. Meaning we are not just here to do what is asked. We support better decisions by making likely outcomes more visible.

That’s one of the reasons we built Tilda’s Behavior Change Score™.

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A Tool to Predict Behavior Change

The Behavior Change Score™ is a predictive model, grounded in more than 40 research studies, that we are developing with researchers at the research institute RISE. It analyzes your initiative, estimates the odds it has to lead to real behavior change. It’s a way to make impact more visible, before we invest time, energy, and resources.

Let's look at an example.

And the Behavior Change Score™ doesn’t just predict outcomes, it also gives you science-based suggestions to strengthen your design, and improve your odds, before you launch.

From sparks that fade to steady flames

And finally, to everyone asking us to do only learning, we can say:

You can’t learn your way out of a behavior problem. But we can architect for the behaviors we want and shape the structures that make them last.

And if this is a shift you’re ready to make too, we built Tilda to support you.

Curious how your learning initiative would score in terms of behavior change?