In 2009 I took the Scrum Master training with Jeff Sutherland. One of the two people who invented Scrum, two days, in a room here in the Netherlands.
It was excellent. Every question I had walked in with was answered. I left feeling that I understood it.
Three days later I stood in front of my first Scrum team and had no idea what to do.
I knew it. I could not do it.
That difference is about behaviour on the job. Not whether somebody learned something, but whether they actually work differently on Monday.
Nothing went wrong.
A training can succeed completely and still produce no change in behaviour. Knowing something and being able to do it are different things, and two days of lessons mostly buys the first. What is missing afterwards is not knowledge but practice, and a classroom cannot hand that over.
This is the uncomfortable part. There was nobody to blame.
The training was not too short and not too shallow. The trainer was literally the person who came up with it.
And I wanted this. I had seen too many projects run on forever and deliver nothing. That had to change, and I was sure this was the way.
And there I stood anyway.
Four levels, and the third is the hard one.
The best known evaluation model in learning and development is Kirkpatrick’s, and it has four levels. They run from how much people enjoyed it to what the organisation gets out of it. The first two fit on a form, but the third asks someone to look at the job months later.
- Reaction. What did you think of it? The form at the end of the day.
- Learning. Do you know it now? A test, an exercise, a conversation.
- Behaviour. Are you doing it? Visible in the work, weeks later.
- Results. Does the organisation get anything out of it?
Level 3 is behaviour: what somebody actually does differently in the work, weeks later.
On levels one and two that training of mine scored full marks. I loved it and I knew the material. On level three I was a zero.
The field calls that third one Kirkpatrick level 3. I had never heard the term when I stood in front of that team, and I now build a product in exactly this space.
NIA This is the level NIA watches. Not in a form afterwards, but in the work itself. What NIA does for organizations.
What actually closed it.
What closed the gap was not more training but a person. An external coach worked alongside the team and said something at the moment it went wrong. That worked because it repeated, and because it happened in the real work rather than in a room.
For the team he was invaluable. For me too, in a way no second training could have delivered.
He watched me struggle. A new team, from developers to marketing, and a way of working that was new to every one of them.
They looked to me, and I did not really know either. That is where you learn it, in that moment, with those people.
And that is also why this goes well for so few people. Putting a coach next to someone costs money and it costs somebody’s time.
Dutch employers spent €2,610 per trained employee a year (CBS, Bedrijfsopleidingen). Most of that budget sits in the room, because the room is the part you can buy.
Meanwhile 32 percent of leaders see change actually stick (Gartner, 2025). So nearly two thirds do not.
The hours when nobody is beside you.
Between the moments a coach is present sits the actual work. That is where new behaviour falls over, and usually nobody notices it happening. What helps is not another session, but something small that keeps coming back where the work actually happens.
Repetition, then. And someone who notices when you let it slide.
That is what we are building NIA for.
Not as a replacement for that coach, but as something else, that does a few things he could not.
He was there two days a month. NIA is always there, which is why it sees the pattern rather than the snapshot.
That helps the coach as well. When he comes back, the conversation starts with what actually happened, not with whatever I happen to remember.
Including the things I had not noticed myself. And I decide what I share, because it is my picture and not a report about me.
And admitting out loud that you have no idea what you are doing always costs something in front of a person. In front of NIA it does not.
Watches with you, thinks with you, keeps you sharp. For all the hours when nobody is beside you.