Why ROI Isn’t About Math (and What Finally Made It Click)
By Jolene Bashore
Senior Instructional Designer and Project Lead
I’ll be honest. When I enrolled in the ROI Institute course in my Performance Improvement Leadership doctoral program, I was nervous. Not because I doubted the value of the work, but because of what I assumed it would demand of me.
Math.
I know I’m not alone. Though return on investment (ROI) analysis asks a question fundamental to every role (“Was the investment worth it?”), people all too often recoil from it, assuming ROI measurement and evaluation are someone else’s responsibility. The accounting team. The budget gatekeepers. The people who decide whether we pinch pennies or spend big.
The fact is, if you’ve been avoiding ROI because it feels intimidating, high stakes, or outside your lane, you’re missing out. ROI analysis and planning deliver information that fuels inspiration. Once you understand the story your data can tell, you can make better decisions, protect what matters, and improve your work in meaningful ways. And trust me on this—you don’t have to love math to dive into ROI evaluation.
Why Explore ROI?
In learning and performance roles, ROI connects training efforts to real business outcomes—not to justify the work, but rather to inform better decisions. And in environments where training is 1 lever among many, ROI-informed thinking helps learning teams collaborate more effectively with commercial, operational, and leadership stakeholders.
So, whether you work in sales, operations, clinical education, or support functions, ROI can help you focus effort where it actually makes a difference.
I can speak to this from experience. In my coursework, something unexpected happened: Yes, the math itself proved manageable, but more importantly, I came to realize that ROI isn’t really about math at all. It’s about thinking differently.
Simple Steps to Start Thinking About ROI
If ROI feels intimidating or out of reach, it may help to realize that you don’t need advanced math skills to begin. Start by focusing on a few practical steps that apply to almost any learning or performance initiative. Although free tools are available to help guide you, the steps themselves are the most important place to begin. In fact, in our role as instructional designers, these are the same steps we return to when helping clients prioritize learning investments and make ROI-informed decisions.
1. Start with the business question.
Before designing content or tracking metrics, clarify what should change in the business if the effort is successful. Simple planning can help you articulate potential results at the start and avoid defaulting to learning-only goals.
For example, imagine a client wants to roll out a manager coaching program. Instead of asking, “Did managers like the training?” the business question becomes, “If this works, what should be measurably different for the organization 6 months from now?” In this case, leaders might agree that increasing documented coaching conversations and observed coaching quality is the performance driver expected to influence that result.
2. Choose 1 outcome to focus on.
Resist the urge to measure everything. Pick a single result that leaders already care about and let other benefits remain supporting or intangible. Many ROI planning tools are designed specifically to help narrow focus rather than expand scope.
For example, rather than trying to measure engagement, confidence, skill application, and retention all at once, a team might choose 1 outcome that leaders already track. To do so, the team could use manager coaching effectiveness scores from an existing engagement survey as the primary performance driver tied to the desired business result.
3. Plan for measurement early.
Identify which measurement mechanisms are already in place, who can provide credible insights, and when meaningful results should realistically appear. Planning this at the start will impact how the work is designed. Templates and checklists can make this step far more manageable than starting from a blank page.
For example, instead of defaulting to post-training surveys, the team can define up front how certain behaviors will be observed and validated, such as through structured leader observations, coaching logs, or follow-up input from direct reports several months after the program.
4. Be conservative on purpose.
Account for other factors, allow room for error, and avoid optimistic assumptions. Conservative estimates build trust. ROI planning can prompt this kind of adjustment so results remain credible.
5. Use ROI to inform decisions, not to judge programs.
ROI is not about proving success or failure. It’s about making trade-offs visible and helping leaders decide where to invest time, money, and effort. The tools support the thinking, but the real value comes from using ROI as a decision aid rather than a scorecard.
If you want to explore further, consider checking out the ROI Institute, which offers free planning tools that introduce their methodology at a high level. Even a light pass through these resources can help you start asking better questions earlier in your work.
Turning Insights Into Actionable Steps
Through my coursework, ROI research reframed how I plan and evaluate my work. For example, I began asking not whether participants liked a training, but instead which business outcome the training was meant to influence. That single move reframed my entire evaluation. ROI wasn’t prompting me to ask, “Was the training good?” It drove me to consider something far less comfortable but far more productive: “Did it matter?”
In this way—and many, many others—ROI has become less a judgment tool for me than a decision tool. It helps me make trade-offs visible, clarify expectations, and gain information that I can actually use. When working with clients, this reframing shifts conversations from defending programs to making informed decisions about where learning can have the greatest impact. As a result, when our L&D team approaches ROI as a planning mindset rather than a reporting requirement, our work becomes more impactful—for learners as well as the business.
I’m confident that completing even rudimentary ROI planning and analysis steps will positively impact your ability to evaluate and improve your work. It’s well worth the effort, even if it does involve a little math.
————–
Jolene Bashore, MEd, is a senior instructional designer and project lead specializing in performance improvement, sales enablement, and learning strategy in life sciences and healthcare. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Performance Improvement Leadership and focuses on aligning learning initiatives with measurable business outcomes.
