The Contoso Convergence, Episode 10: The Wayfinder’s Gap

An Advanced Dungeons & Dynamics 365 session. Episode 10 of 14.

Previously on: Episode 9, The Real Cost, the party proved that Feld’s sixty percent rebate automation cut hadn’t saved money at all, it had just moved the cost onto Oskar’s calendar where nobody was tracking it. Feld approved the fix on the spot.

Every fire the party has put out so far has lived in the system, in the ledger, in the integrations, in the chart of accounts. This episode, the fire finally shows up in the people, and it’s the kind of problem a clean go live can’t fix on its own.

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The Session

GM: Marge runs a readiness assessment. Eight power users, one basic scenario: process an order, ship it, invoice it.

Marge: Two pass clean. Six need help at some point in the process.

Thorne: Same six who sat through training in month one?

Marge: Same six.

Ai. Cassiopeia: Training completion was recorded at ninety four percent. Retention, apparently, was not measured.

Sable: That’s the forgetting curve. Training happened five months before go live. Nobody built in reinforcement.

Vex: So we trained people once, checked a box, and assumed the knowledge would just stay?

Marge: It’s the single most common failure point I’ve seen. Bigger than any integration bug.

Thorne: Three weeks isn’t enough time to retrain from scratch.

Marge: It’s enough time to build a proficiency system instead of a training event. Short, repeated, gamified reinforcement. Not a redo of month one.

Vex: (pulling up the training completion report) Look at this. Ninety four percent completion, and the completion metric is literally just “did they click through all the slides.” There’s no assessment attached at all.

Sable: So we’ve been measuring attendance and calling it competence.

Ai. Cassiopeia: That is an accurate summary of the metric’s actual scope, yes.

Marge: Which means we don’t actually know what any of these eight people know right now. We only know what they sat through once, five months ago.

Thorne: (grimly) We’re not three weeks behind on training. We’re flying blind on it, and we just found that out three weeks before go live.

Sable pulls out a coordinate map of every process the eight users need to own, the beginning of what the party will start calling the Wayfinder’s Network.

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The metric that was never measuring the thing

Ninety four percent completion sounds like a success metric right up until you ask what it’s actually counting. In this case, it was counting attendance, whether someone clicked through every slide, and nothing about whether the material stuck, or whether the person could apply it under real conditions five months later. That’s not a rare mistake. It’s the default mistake, because attendance is easy to measure and competence is hard to measure, and organizations tend to report the metric they have rather than the metric they need.

The forgetting curve isn’t a new idea. Psychologists have understood for over a century that knowledge decays predictably after a single exposure unless it’s reinforced. What’s notable here isn’t that Contoso’s training decayed, that was always going to happen. What’s notable is that nobody built anything to catch the decay before go live, because the completion dashboard said ninety four percent and ninety four percent looked like done.

This is the gap a lot of change management plans never close: the difference between “we delivered training” and “we know what people currently know.” The first is a project milestone. The second is a fact about the state of the organization, and it’s the only one of the two that actually predicts what happens on a Monday morning cutover. Marge’s instinct, build a proficiency system instead of trying to cram a redo of month one into three weeks, is the right move precisely because it treats competence as something you maintain continuously, not something you deliver once and check off.

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What happens next

The party now has three weeks to build what should have existed from month one: a system that actually measures and reinforces what these eight people know, rather than what they once sat through. But building the character sheets for each power user surfaces something the readiness assessment completely missed, the person who scored worst on the test might actually be the sharpest set of eyes in the building.

Next episode: Episode 11, Character Sheets (coming soon)

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The forgetting curve is the whole reason Gamifying the Enterprise: Game Mechanics for Continuous Proficiency exists. If this episode felt familiar, that’s not a coincidence, it’s the book’s founding problem, worked out here in real time. Available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GY3VWLVX

And if you want the actual framework behind building a proficiency system instead of a training event, start here: adnd365.com/start