There is a particular kind of organisational blind spot that develops slowly, and is difficult to see from the inside. It is the gap between activity and outcome — between the effort that is clearly visible and the result that is never clearly measured.
English development programs in Indonesian corporations are, in many cases, a reliable example of this pattern.
The investment is real. Providers are engaged. Programs are run. Budgets are allocated year after year. The intention behind all of it is genuine — to develop a workforce that can communicate effectively in English, with international stakeholders, in the contexts that matter most to the business.
But the measurement rarely reaches that far. What gets measured is what is easy to measure. Attendance. Course completion. Participant satisfaction. These numbers are reported, reviewed, and used to justify the following year’s budget. They suggest that the program is functioning.
What they do not reveal is whether the communication problems that prompted the investment have changed.
This disconnect is rarely confronted directly — partly because it is uncomfortable, and partly because defining what success looks like for English communication development is genuinely difficult. What does improved communication look like in a board presentation? In a cross-border negotiation? In the way risk is escalated to a regional headquarters? These outcomes are real, but they are not captured by a completion rate.
The result is that organisations continue investing in English development without accumulating meaningful evidence of its effect. The program is renewed not because it demonstrably worked, but because the need is still present — which is taken, implicitly, as evidence that more of the same is required.
This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of definition. The organisation never clearly articulated what change it was trying to produce, which made it impossible to know whether it was being produced.
When did your organisation last ask not whether the English program ran — but whether it worked?
ELC Coaching helps HR and L&D leaders define what communication capability development should actually produce — and builds programs that can be evaluated against those outcomes.
