Walk into an ice cream shop and they'll have vanilla. Everyone does.
Walk into a leadership development budget meeting and someone will mention 70:20:10. Everyone does.
The model is 70% learning on-the-job, 20% from others and 10% formal training. It's familiar and easy to defend in a board paper. In many organisations, it has also become a reason nothing changes.
The model lost its point along the way
The model is usually traced to Center for Creative Leadership research published in 1988, in which successful executives described the experiences that had shaped them. The 70:20:10 formula came later, in Lombardo and Eichinger's 1996 development planner. They summarised it as roughly 70% from tough jobs, 20% from people (mostly the boss), and 10% from courses and reading.
Look at the wording: tough jobs, mostly the boss. The original accounts were about hardship, and about the people who shaped leaders through it. Somewhere between the research and the slide deck, the industry kept the percentages and dropped the experiences.
It was never a scientific formula either. A peer-reviewed review by Clardy (2018) found the evidence for treating it as fact is thin. It's a rough prompt, not a law.
In a poorly designed system:
70% becomes more of the same work.
20% becomes advice from peers who think the same way.
10% becomes a standalone course with no follow-through.
The ratio survives, but development doesn't.
The cost shows up in your P&L
Saks and Belcourt surveyed training professionals across 150 organisations. Respondents estimated that 62% of employees applied what they had learned immediately after training. That fell to 44% after six months and 34% after a year. These are estimates, not a universal transfer rate, but the trend is hard to ignore.
In Harvard Business Review, Beer, Finnström and Schrader put global spending on employee training and education at about US$356 billion in 2015. They argued that people revert to old habits less because programs are poor and more because the organisation blocks them. They named the usual causes:
unclear strategy and conflicting priorities,
a senior team that hasn't committed to change,
poor coordination across functions, and
people afraid to tell the top team what's getting in the way.
Even a well-designed program will achieve little if the workplace blocks its use. So the question for budget holders isn't only "Is this program good?" The sharper question is "Will our organisation let it work?"
Why the safe option keeps winning
L&D teams don't lack ambition. They're given a brief that contradicts itself:
Engaging, but not disruptive.
High impact, on a smaller budget.
Stretch, without discomfort.
Growth without discomfort isn't on offer. When the brief asks for it, providers sell what they can deliver: polished, well-rated and unlikely to change behaviour.
"We can't manufacture a crisis"
That's fair, and you don't need to. You can:
assign real jumps in scope on purpose instead of waiting for them,
move promising leaders into turnaround roles,
tie learning to live work, with real authority, support and room to learn from mistakes,
give people a coach to help them make sense of it, and
fix the system they return to.
Formal learning still has a place. A course that builds a skill people then practise, with a manager who expects to see it used, earns its 10%. A course on its own rarely does.
Four questions before you sign the next contract
What will this leader do differently, and who will notice?
Which real assignment is this learning attached to?
What in our system will punish the new behaviour?
Six months on, who will have seen the change in real work, and which business measure should it move? Satisfaction scores and completion rates don't count.
If the answers are vague, you're buying vanilla.
Where Plexity Partners fits
Plexity works where business acumen and people performance meet. Sitting independently as a partner to the buyer to help executives decide where to invest in capability, hold providers to outcomes, and design development that's tied to real work.
The name is a nod to complexity: navigating it, connecting the dots across systems, and shaping a clear path forward.
Coming next: AI and the 10%
AI is making formal learning cheaper and faster to produce. The real test isn't cost. It's whether that content is accurate and relevant to real work, whether practice and feedback follow it, and whether it's judged by changes in behaviour rather than volume. More on that in the next post.
References
Beer, M., Finnström, M., & Schrader, D. (2016). Why leadership training fails—and what to do about it. Harvard Business Review, 94(10), 50–57.
Clardy, A. (2018). 70-20-10 and the dominance of informal learning: A fact in search of evidence. Human Resource Development Review, 17(2), 153–178. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534484318759399
Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. (1996). The career architect development planner (1st ed.). Lominger Limited.
McCall, M. W., Jr., Lombardo, M. M., & Morrison, A. M. (1988). The lessons of experience: How successful executives develop on the job. Lexington Books.
Saks, A. M., & Belcourt, M. (2006). An investigation of training activities and transfer of training in organizations. Human Resource Management, 45(4), 629–648. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.20135