From Training to Performance: Rethinking How We Learn on the Job

Learning doesn't stop when formal training ends—it continues in the flow of work. On this episode of Powered by Learning, Chief Learning Evangelist and Co-Founder of Apply Synergies Bob Mosher discusses the Five Moments of Need and how organizations can embed learning into the workplace to drive real performance outcomes. 

Show Notes:

Here are some of the key points from our interview with Bob Mosher about the Five Moments of Need framework. 

• The Five Moments of Need Framework Enhances Workplace Learning: Traditional training focuses on acquiring new knowledge, but real learning happens when employees apply their skills on the job. The Five Moments of Need—New, More, Apply, Change, and Solve—help organizations create a more effective learning ecosystem.
• A Performance-First Mindset Leads to Better Outcomes: Organizations should shift from a "training-first" mindset to a "performance-first" approach. This means embedding learning into the flow of work rather than relying solely on formal training sessions.
• Measuring Learning Impact with Business KPIs: Learning should be tied to measurable business outcomes, not just completion rates or assessment scores. Mosher emphasized the importance of workflow learning dashboards that correlate learning consumption with performance improvements.
• Regulated Industries Can Still Embrace Workflow Learning: Compliance training is necessary, but it doesn’t have to be limited to traditional classroom settings. By embedding learning into daily tasks, organizations—especially those in highly regulated industries—can enhance retention and reduce errors.
• AI is Revolutionizing Learning and Performance Support: AI is playing a growing role in workplace learning by reducing the time SMEs spend creating content and enhancing real-time, in-the-moment learning with digital coaching and performance support tools. However, ensuring AI-generated content is contextual and accurate remains a key challenge.

Listen to Bob Mosher's podcast. 

Learn more about the Five Moments of Need

Powered by Learning earned Awards of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio and Business Podcast categories from The Communicator Awards and a Gold and Silver Davey Award. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide.

Learn more about d'Vinci at www.dvinci.com.
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Transcript

Susan Cort: [00:00:00] The role of learning in the workplace is constantly evolving, and many organizations are shifting to a performance first mindset to get desired results. 

Bob Mosher: We've created some remarkable dashboards relative to the methodology and the tools that we use that show remarkable correlation between consumption of workflow learning deliverables and alignment to KPIs.

Susan Cort: That's Bob Mosher, Chief Learning Evangelist, Co-Founder at Apply Synergies. Bob will talk with d’Vinci’s Director, Learning Experience, Jenny Fedullo and me, about the Five Moments of Need and how it supports learners during formal training and in the real-world application of their skills. Next, on Powered by Learning.

Announcer: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d’Vinci Interactive. d’Vinci's approach to learning is grounded in 30 years of innovation and expertise. We use proven strategies and leading technology to develop solutions [00:01:00] that power learners to improve quality and boost performance. Learn more at dvinci.com.

Susan Cort: Hi, Bob, and welcome to Powered by Learning. It's great to see you again. 

Jenny Fedullo Yeah. Hi, Bob. Good to see you. 

Bob Mosher: Well, I appreciate that, friends. I am so looking forward to the dialogue, and thanks for inviting me in. 

Susan Cort: Uh, well we are too. Bob, start things off by telling us a little bit about your background. 

Bob Mosher: Well, this could take the whole time, but in a nutshell, this is my 43rd year in education.

First five were a public school teacher with eight and nine year olds. I got pulled into IT education because of my master's in adult education, actually in computer education, they called it back then, K 12, but started teaching adults when this thing called the PC. 

Bob Mosher: And, uh, that turned my life around, you know, 37 years ago, whatever that, what the math is, uh, and I've been on just this wonderful journey, um, of, uh, adult education since so fast forwarding to today, I formally am the chief learning evangelist of an organization called [00:02:00] Apply Synergies, we are a services and product firm that helps organizations navigate the five moments of need, be them L& D or lines of business, and we help them build a lot of what we'll talk about today.

Susan Cort: Wonderful.

Jenny Fedullo:. Interesting. So looking at the Five Moments of Need, what we're talking about here, it certainly has become a widely recognized framework for performance based learning. And I'd love to start by understanding its origins. So I know we had taught before and you had mentioned that your counterpart, Conrad Gottfredson had developed the framework. Was it primarily based on his own research? Did he use other models? Where did he draw his inspiration? I'm really curious. 

Bob Mosher: Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Um, and, and I think it's part of the, as what the legitimacy, frankly, to the methodology, because, uh, Con always introduced himself as a PhD with an RWE, and that stands for real world experience.

Not, Um, you know, the, the doctoral side and he started out as a, as an L&D professional at a large oil company when he got out of grad school and immediately ran face [00:03:00] long into the idea of developing courses under the methodology he'd been taught. And immediately the business pushed back and was like, uh, that's terrific.

But, you know, you've been doing this for what now, three months and we haven't gotten anything yet. And he's like, well, you know, I'm, I'm in the fifth step of the, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And the business said, you know, I don't care. It's, uh, you know, we have people to get trained and this is taking too long and that was literally the beginning of him realizing that, uh, maybe there's a different mousetrap at doing this. And so he's, he's, he's a theorist by nature. Um, and, uh, that was the beginning of, it wasn't by any means called the Five Moments of Need then, but he realized that training alone as a deliverable was not going to be enough. And I think practically it was just out of an issue of, of timeliness.

Um, and so he started on the journey to something more pragmatic, more workflow based, dug into the research, like experiential learning, scaffolding, other kinds of things, uh, took a hard look at Addy that of course we all know and love and, um, and that's what eventually evolved when I met him 20 years ago when I [00:04:00] was a senior director of learning at Microsoft to this whole idea of, uh, the, the framework of the Five Moments.

Jenny Fedullo: Interesting. So we know that learning doesn't stop after formal training, right? It means that reinforcement, the real-world application. So how do you see the five moments of need addressing that balance between structured learning companies like their onboarding programs, right? And then that informal learning that happens on the job.

Bob Mosher: Yeah, they sure do. You know, the, the infamous Ebbinghaus Curve, right? Uh, the forgetful curve that we've, we've all seen quoted in so many presentations and such. And yeah, so it's, I guess the elephant in the room has been this reality for us forever. And even my, even my own. My own efforts out of my grad school work and into adult education, but I was a one hit wonder, frankly, I, I knew about the problem.

Our clients challenged us on it. My team struggled with it, but we didn't have really anything else. And so the Five Moments comes along and says, you know, there's new and more two of the five that a learner has. And I don't know anything [00:05:00] or I know some stuff and would like to learn more. Right? That's it.

That's the formal learning side address best. With a formal learning side of instruction design, but there's this remarkable world and much larger world for everyday performers. And that's the world of apply and with two derivatives of that when I'm trying to apply when things change, or I'm trying to apply when I've screwed up, I have to solve a problem.

And so it addresses that world beyond the classroom, because what we find is that. The degree of new and more training people get every year is minimal. You know, the classic 40 hours of training in my old days, companies used to mandate, well, 40 hours, that's a week. You know, there's what, 46 and a half others counting PTO.

You know, and so, so how do we get out into that world? So the methodology and the framework, I should say, we'll dissect that in a bit. But the framework says, no, no, no. We, if we don't address apply as the bullseye, frankly, and the bulk of what a performer. lives in [00:06:00] with change and self being a part of that, um, and only stop at new and more.

We are woefully lacking in our ability to support a learner or performer, we'd like to say, through their entire journey of work. 

Jenny Fedullo: You know what I neglected to do when we first started for our listeners that are not familiar with the five moments. Do you mind just a quick quickly recapping what it is. 

Bob Mosher: I will. And I went through them quickly there, but I'll come back. The, the, it's interesting because when we first, when the theory first was on a slide, it had five moments, right? And so we numbered them, you know, new, more, apply, solve, change. And, um, we've, we've since backed off that because the problem when you number things is people do them in order or think there's an order.

And they also sometimes think there's a priority because number one is better than number five. Right? And so what we've found, what we've come around to is that in the Five Moments, looking through the lens of a day's work, right? Obviously, when I come to work, if I have trained that day at all, formal, I'm in apply all day, right?

So the number one, if you want to put a number to it, [00:07:00] need of any performer of your day is I've got to apply what I've learned, be it formally or otherwise, informally, right? To my job. Now, things are going to change in the world we live in. Right? So we don't, my dad did the same job for 36 years and would argue, didn't change a lot.

We're in a different world now. Change is the new normal. And so how do I come in to the derivative apply when I get the memo or I don't get the memo? That something's different. How do I adjust and keep up with that? I screw up. You know, I, I think I know what I'm doing or I don't, uh, I wander into places I've not been before and I, you know, fail.

How do I get out of that? So that's the third need. The, the two addressed by formal instruction is I don't know anything about it. Um, and I want new and more means I have a base knowledge, but I want a more new. On top of that, right? So new and more get confused a lot because people think, um, that more is [00:08:00] always is sort of like a, like a, like a, and this word changing market confused.

Cause people think, well, isn't if it is more as in something's different. So I have to learn more about it. No, that's change more is I have like one Oh one understanding and I have to go on. But because of that, I can go into 201, which is still new. But because I have context, that next journey into new, uh, is a lot different than, uh, nothing to start.

Jenny Fedullo: So where does gaps come in? Right? So it's not new cause I was trained and I don't need. More, but maybe I need more because I have a gap. So where, where do gaps? 

Bob Mosher: In Con's framework, it would depend on the context of that gap, right? If it's something, if it's gap, because I'm going from brain surgery to, uh, to podiatry, um, that, that gap is like, I mean, it's, it's medicine, but it's new, right?

If the gap is more, it's that, you know, it's, it's, I understand the base level [00:09:00] brain surgery. But I'm going to do, but a brand new methodology has come out, a brand new thing, not a change of something I did, but a brand new approach, a new, a new technology, robotics, this kind of thing. And so I still have the base knowledge of brain surgery, but I have to go to this new thing.

And the gap, the skills gap, knowledge gap, skills is probably better, performance gap, how's that, would be filled in that case by a more instance. Okay. 

Jenny Fedullo: Okay. Yeah. So many of our listeners. Are likely familiar with 70, 20, 10, right? That's that's pretty common in in our industry. So for those of you that aren't, it's really breaking learning into experiential, which is 70 percent social, 20%.

And then then we acquire, you know, learning through a formal means, which is 10%. How does the Five Moments of Need align or maybe not align with that model. 

Bob Mosher: Yeah, it does. Yeah, it's brilliant. And yeah, and I was familiar with that coming into this. Um, and so, uh, Con would, again, con would argue, or not argue, con would [00:10:00] say that new is, new and more is the 10th.

That's the formal, right? And any derivative of the 10. And what I love about the math is it does show you mathematically, because 720, if the five moments of deed sounds like, well, 20, 20, 20. That makes a hundred, you know, well, that's not a learner's world. You know, 10%, but what I've liked about that math is it does say, look, the reality is 10 percent of the, of the time.

And I think, frankly, nowadays that might be smaller. I get formal instruction, uh, that would be in cons needs new and more based. 

Bob Mosher: The 70 would be apply. Right. And maybe change and solve is in there too. Uh, cause that's, those are again, derivatives of the, of, of the other, the social con kind of says, um, in his opinion kind of lies across all of it, frankly, right?

There's, there's a social side of formal instruction and there's a social side of the 70, where I bother a neighbor, call a help desk, have a coach. And so he kind of sees it writing, not so much addressed by one of the five moments, but writing. [00:11:00] across as a modality, as a, as a way of, of getting support, um, across all five.

Jenny Fedullo: Interesting. 

Bob Mosher: Yeah. 

Jenny Fedullo: So Garnier, good old Gagné - Gagné's Nine Events of Instruction, I think is, um, kind of transcends time, right? It still is relevant today. So it certainly suggests that effective learning includes opportunities for assessment while traditional training often relies on the formal eval Kirkpatrick model that we're all familiar with, but in work.

Place learning impact is often reflected in job performance and business KPIs, right? So that should make measuring impact easier, right? Or kind of what are your thoughts there?

Bob Mosher: Jenny, this is what is the most exciting thing for me about this because, uh, again, you can kind of go back to my story and your question about how I got here is I would love to say that I just went, you know, I should be a better L& D person.

So I'm going to find this Gottfredson guy and expand my knowledge. Well, no, I was in trouble. I was a part of a learning team that was fevered to the fire [00:12:00] about impact, you know, and it was like, and, and I, I'm not going to give the context of the, of the organization because that wasn't the nature of the problem.

It was, it was systemic of a problem I'd had until I found this thing, which is whenever anyone said, you know, align your training to ROI impact performance and stuff, it got hard, you know, like, like directly. You know, aligned. Okay. And so ROI, I mean, I've been chasing the acronym forever. I studied under Donald.

We all do. And he's a wonderful man. God bless him. And, and, and, and Phillips and Patti, Jack and Patti added level five. Because this lives in the workflow, because you design for the workflow, because the deliverables are consumed in the workflow. And if they're digital, which nowadays is very prevalent, in fact, our ability to associate consumption to performance to, uh, to ability to or not perform is significantly higher than when I tried to draw a correlation or causation between someone sitting with me for six hours and [00:13:00] then 30 days later being good at it.

Bob Mosher: I, you know, we can, we, we've created some remarkable dashboards relative to the methodology and the tools that we use that show remarkable Correlation between consumption of workflow learning deliverables and alignment to KPIs, ability to fill skills gaps, time to competency, um, compared to groups that don't have it, people that can't, you know, don't have those things.

So it's, it's really, for me, it's been, it has filled that missing, um, ask. 

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah, indeed. 

Bob Mosher: Yeah. 

Jenny Fedullo: So. I know you touched on this when you mentioned the 40 hour, you know, annual training requirements. So I know organizations struggle with the shift from traditional training to performance learning. It happened to me where we had a 40 hour and it was dropped because it was complicated and they only viewed, executives only viewed training as that formal, right?

So what, what misconceptions about learning and development do you think hold companies back from fully embracing this workflow [00:14:00] learning model? 

Bob Mosher: You know, we are one of the few professions, Jenny, that, that we. Do what we've also been put through since we were six, you know, we are everyone who's been in instruction feels they can do it.

I mean, I remember it back to my school teaching days when parents used to walk in my room and be like, you know, Here's my idea why my kid's not doing well, and I'm like, you know, I appreciate your opinion. But to be honest with you, I have a degree in this, you know, there's theory, there's, there's a, you know, and so, so I think part of it is that is just the lineage of the discipline.

You know, everyone's had L& D brick and mortar classrooms. Take digital out of it, right? Since the beginning of time and whenever there was a performance problem or a new employee or a new leader or whatever, or a technology popped up, our innate response from the business was training, let's train them up.

Let's have them, let's have them help master it. You know, we use these remarkable, grandiose words, right? And so. It's what we're, it's, it's the devil we know if I dare go there, you know, it's, it's, it's what we're comfortable with. The irony is when you [00:15:00] get behind closed doors and we've done, and you know, ask some hard questions, and we've done this now for 20 years that we've been at it, a lot of people would prefer to not have training if they didn't have to.

You know, they prefer to not leave, leave work if they, and, and, and have those types of things. But it's, it's turning around a mindset of what we call the training first mindset to one of performance first mindset, um, and training if you have to, uh, but that it's, it's a one 80 and part of it's our doing.

I've always argued, to be honest, when you, if you have a hammer, everything's a nail. You know, and so L& D departments are always, you know, I want to sit at the table. I want all those things. But when you, when you look at it and say, well, look with them, what do you bring to the table? And they go, well, I got an LMS, I got a new learning thing.

I got a class. And it's like, well, well, then why would you expect a line of business to come in your office and talk about performance deliverables or performance up? You know? And so, so again, it wasn't malicious. We don't wake up in the morning to do that, but it is [00:16:00] the, it is the, the learning culture ecosystem we, we are handed. And so we have to not just talk about the change, but be able to deliver on the change. 

Jenny Fedullo: It reminds me, are you familiar with the, um, oh, I can't think of the author, the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team. In there is, um, it talks about, you're not going to change somebody's belief until you give them new experiences.

Bob Mosher: Absolutely. 

Jenny Fedullo: And this feels like along those same exact lines. 

Bob Mosher: Yeah. In the early days, I had this deck that I thought was. Just inspiring, you know, that I had the Five Moments on it. We have this thing called train, transfer, sustain that shows the learning journey and lays training over it and shows, you know, uh, statistically research space, why it falls short, not that it's bad, but, and I get every head to non and I got every head to non in the room.

And then I said, okay, look, you're there. You're at the precipice. I've led the horse to water. Right? So we're all [00:17:00] nodding. So now let's do this. Well, guess what? I said, but now let's do this thing. They went, wait, wait, wait, what, what, what? Wait, no, you're Mike. We're not going to have the class. We're going to shorten onboarding.

We're going to get rid of our element. Now, these are, those are extreme examples, but to your point, we ran headlong into change. And, and that was on me and it, because I just thought that the, the leading the horse to water with then it would innately understand it's drinking from a new pond. Um, and it did not.

And so you're spot on when people ask, how do you start this change? You have to build something. 

Bob Mosher: They 

have to experience it. You can slide deck ‘em to death. You can show, I have research to fill my office of ROI, and people go, Hmm, well, great. But darn it. When you start, you know, backing them up against, and you appear to be backing away, which you're really not, from training that they've known forever, they get scared.

They get anxious. They get [00:18:00] defensive. You know, so build something. 

Jenny Fedullo: Your model requires learning to be deeply embedded in work systems, but some industries, especially highly regulated ones, still rely heavily on formal due to their compliance requirements. I get it. How do you navigate that tension between the structured learning and that just in time performance support?

Bob Mosher: And I love the word tension, to be honest, because that's really what it is, you know, and you have to, back to our question a moment ago, you have to, eventually it stops being tension because they see the blend. I see the comp, they see the compliment. How's that? Right? Right now, they're not, they're seeing a, you know, versus in the middle, right?

Not, not, um, in, in compliment to. So again, in the beginning of my journey, the mistake I made was that I came across like it was replacing something. Or that training was bad, neither are true. Right? Um, and so highly regulated areas. We've helped hospitals. We've helped military. We've helped up. We've helped banks, insurance, highly [00:19:00] regulated, right?

Safety to legalities. And what you what you have to be careful of is they'll back off of those when they understand. The compliment of it to the better mousetrap, right? So we do not attack compliance training. We don't try to say you don't want to have to do as much of it a year from now, which, which by the way, you may not, but right.

You have to compliment the tension and ease it by saying, look, we're not walking away from compliance, regulatory, the odds you faced by any means. What you probably experienced every year are maybe some compliance errors. You have instances. What if you ran that? You know, we did this in a very large hospital that was having issues with, um, one of the simplest of things, which is, um, washing their hands.

It's a, it's a, it's a, you know, in the simple things that happen on the floor, right? And, but there's, they, they're all compliant. They'd all taken the test. They [00:20:00] all had the check boxes, that type of stuff. But the auditor that caught the, caught the problem to their credit, push this L& D professional and say, look, I don't want, I don't want to come back here.

And you have, you put everyone through testing again because you, you did that. And we had this incident happen. So you have to come back to me with something else. And so they ran at that. Incident, not, not safety training. It's too big an ocean to boil. And they showed a tool on the floor for the nurses to help them remember, remediate that thing.

And the incident went down. 

Jenny Fedullo: Wow. 

Bob Mosher: So then they said, well, wait a second. Can we try four more of these? Can we, we get, and, and, and to fast forward five years, believe it or not, five years later, they had an entire suite of embedded, what we call digital coaches, over a hundred, um, that ran the, what they call the patient care process from registration to, uh, when, when they left and the degree of the compliant [00:21:00] training, not out, not went away, but went down.

Because they had proven that they had another mousetrap. I mean, compliance training came along because bad things happened. And we really needed a way to put a finger in that, in that dam. And I get it. Um, I think what we realized is that we thought then that that was the silver bullet was enough, and then boy, we, we, it swamped our ships.

Yeah, it did. And in, and in many organizations has a bad 

Jenny Fedullo: mm-hmm . So ai, you knew this question was coming right, ? Sure. So, so we save the best for last , we see a lot of organizations adopting ai, automating their learning. How do you see technology shaping this, the, the implementation of the five moments of need, particularly in providing real time, you know, performance support?

Bob Mosher: Yeah, it's a great question and I, I, there's it. There's two ways we're seeing that are emerging, and then I'll do a little forecasting, but I get anxious about that, especially with something as volatile as AI. But um, you know, [00:22:00] getting access to SMEs, S M E s, Sonic Manor experts, um, is hard. Uh, it's always been hard.

Generative AI is doing some remarkable things in its ability to reduce, we've seen, the involvement of SMEs in content development and maintenance by 75%. That's staggering. 

Jenny Fedullo: That is staggering.

Bob Mosher: So think about a month long course or a month long development, most are longer, right, down to a week. That's, that's remarkable, right?

So, so there's, so there's that side. Now, on the flip side is agents. We've always called a, an embedded, um, workflow learning tool, a digital coach, uh, before AI, um, really reared its head a few, a year, a few years back. But, um, the development of agents in coaching in particular. Uh, is where we're seeing, um, it, it getting a, a, a foothold, we're kind of over the chat bot thing, I think in a lot of ways, you know, it's, it's, again, it was sort of like Google when it first came out and he was like, Oh my [00:23:00] gosh, I can type something in and I get a thousand hits.

That's remarkable. And then a month later, we're like a thousand hits really. 

Jenny Fedullo: Yeah. 

Bob Mosher: And my, and my answer was the 500th one, which I never got to, by the way. Right. And so there's a similar, there's a similar reality of the lift. To prompt well, the lift for, you know, Dr. Gottfredson is working right now with some folks on, on the framework around five moments relative to content mining and, and prompting and, and feedback and, you know, hallucinating all these weird words we hear, you know, it's the interesting thing to, uh, if I can may use the word control.

Jenny Fedullo: Um, 

Bob Mosher: because there is that intelligent side of it, or so it's called, but intelligence without context is chaos. And that's frankly what we're seeing. It doesn't have context. It doesn't know context yet anyway. So that's where we're really seeing it on the agent side and coaching, prompting, um, and, and on the, and the generative content side on [00:24:00] the SME lift and content to deliverable.

It's just really remarkable. 

Susan Cort: Remarkable. Absolutely.

Jenny Fedullo:  Absolutely. 

Susan Cort: Bob, you do an awful lot of writing and speaking in the industry, and you have a podcast. Tell our listeners, if they want to learn more about this topic and hear more from you, where can they go? 

Bob Mosher: Of course. Great question. Thank you. Yeah, we do, we do a podcast, uh, Performance Matters, uh, that people can tune into.

Um, but at 5momentsofneed.com, the number 5.momentsofneed.com. There is a resource tab in there that has all of our blogs, our eBook, our whitepapers, our videos, you know, things that people have been gracious enough to let us do. They're all up there and you can find me and Dr. Gottfredson there as well.

And so that, that will give you everything from The Five Moments to the some of the things I've referenced and more, so it'd be a great place to start. 

Susan Cort: That's great. We'll put a note in the show notes so people can easily access all that. We can't thank you enough for joining us today. It was really [00:25:00] interesting, really great topic.

So thanks for sharing your time. 

Jenny Fedullo:  Yeah, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. 

Bob Mosher: Appreciate both of you and the questions, so I hope it's helpful. 

Susan Cort: Thanks to Jenny Fedullo, d’Vinci's Director Learning Experience, and our guest Bob Mosher for joining us today. If you have an idea for a topic or a guest, please reach out to us at PoweredByLearning@dvinci.com.And don't forget to subscribe to Powered by Learning wherever you listen to your podcasts.