Spectrum Thinking: Designing Your Development Programs
When designing development programs, every decision exists on a spectrum. One end prioritizes business-driven decisions, emphasizing efficiency, cost, and immediate impact. The other end prioritizes experience-driven decisions, emphasizing employee engagement, self-discovery, and long-term growth. Determining where to fall on the spectrum is one of the most challenging aspects of program design. Below are a few thoughts to supporting your decision-making.
1. The spectrum is applied to each decision, not the entire program
Not every element of a development program needs to align with the same part of the spectrum.
You might land on one part of the spectrum when focusing on content but another part of the spectrum when focusing on structural elements.
Some of this is driven by stakeholder balance and trade-offs.
This approach allows program designers to customize each element based on what will deliver the outcome the program is seeking.
2. Consider Your Company Values
Your company values should influence how you approach program design.
If your values prioritize customer impact, decisions may skew toward the business-driven side.
For example, in a rotation program, you might implement fewer, longer rotations. This allows employees to develop expertise in each role, maximize their impact, and minimize the burden on managers, who otherwise spend significant time retraining new hires.
If your values emphasize employee growth, decisions may lean more experience-driven.
For example, in a leadership development program, you may focus as much on community-building and engagement as you do skill-building—creating an immersive experience that fosters connections alongside professional growth.
Values don’t dictate every decision, but they provide clear direction for aligning programs with organizational priorities.
3. Leverage Data
Before making decisions, gather insights from multiple sources. This may include:
Employee engagement surveys—What do they need? What do they want?
Exit interviews—Why are they leaving? What do you want to fix?
Leadership interviews—What opportunities do they see? How much of the spectrum are they comfortable with?
Not only does data help you make your decisions, it helps create buy-in for your program from both leadership and participants.
4. Test Your Ideas
Speaking of buy-in, program design shouldn't happen in a vacuum. Validate your decisions before finalizing them:
Share your design and reasoning with leaders—Based on this design, how committed are they to supporting the program and participants? What concerns do they have?
Get feedback from potential participants—Does the program resonate with their needs?
Their responses act as additional data points—either confirming your decisions or pushing you to rethink where you land on the spectrum.
5. Embrace Change
No program decision needs to be permanent. Some adjustments happen because the program didn’t produce the expected outcomes. Others happen because the world evolves, requiring new strategies.
Effective programs adapt over time—through feedback, iteration, and responsiveness to change.
Final Thoughts
Spectrum thinking helps us make deliberate decisions with our programs. This may be based on finding balance, values, data, validation or adaptability. The key is being intentional about where each decision falls to ensure alignment with outcomes you intend. By taking a structured yet flexible approach, organizations can create development programs that are strategic and impactful.
If you are building or improving a development program, feel free to the leverage the Contact page to have a conversation on how Taber Coaching can support your needs.