This article is part of a series: Learning Lessons from Stanley Cup and Super Bowl Champions. Previous piece in this series: Agile Learning: How Elite Sports Teams Make their Training Fast, Focused, and Flexible.
When the Rams or the Penguins use Learn to Win, they don’t waste time teaching the basic concepts that every pro player should already know.
Instead, coaches focus training on their team’s specific playbook. They prepare to compete against next week’s specific opponent. So they focus on play corrections and scouting reports – the specific knowledge that players need to master to be ready for game day.
Your team’s training should be just as laser-focused. Yet 80% of licensed training content is never used.
The reason? It’s too generic to be useful to reps in the moment of need. It covers basic foundational knowledge – but your reps already know that, or you wouldn’t have hired them!
The knowledge that drives performance in the field can’t be bought off-the-shelf. It lives in your top performer’s heads. Research has shown that team-specific operational knowledge is 6x more valuable than generic training.
We call this Last Mile Knowledge. It’s the team-specific operational knowledge that drives performance.
How do you position your specific product features? How do you use your specific equipment? What do you know about your specific competitors?
Last Mile Knowledge is training gold, but it’s often hard for organizations to capture and share. It’s documented informally (if at all) – sometimes in chat threads, forwarded emails, or just ‘tap-on-the-shoulder’ conversations with colleagues. And when your people change jobs, that valuable knowledge often leaves with them.
Luckily, Learn to Win makes it fast and easy to capture the Last Mile Knowledge in your organization. That way, you can focus your valuable training time on the knowledge that matters.
