Anna Odumodu, Leah Henderson
June 27, 2025
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A better, easier, more human-centered way to measure impact in all its complexities.
Introducing the Hult Ashridge Process for Impact (HAPI)
At Hult Ashridge Executive Education, we commit to delivering real, sustained change within organizations, but how do you effectively measure that change?
The Hult Ashridge Process for Impact (HAPI) is a human-centered impact measurement that enables the L&D leader to demonstrate change at multiple levels while reinforcing participants’ learning to maximize the potential for positive difference and impact.
How does it work?
1. It’s a process – not a one-off event
When impact takes center stage, it’s often at the end of a program. But if you want to ascertain whether the impact you need from development investment has been made, the conversation has to start much earlier. You need to know what you’re measuring and what comparison you’re making between now and then. This also helps in confirming your design. For this reason, HAPI starts when the learning design conversations begin, and is integrated into the whole learning journey.
"This is not something that you do at the end as an add-on. This is something that integrates with everything on the learning journey.”
2. Combining the data to identify the trends and tell the story
HAPI contains elements that can track participant, team and organizational metrics across every part of the learning journey, from digital to face-to-face – and it's the combination of these measures that tells the story.
Of course, team and organizational measures require the client to be fully involved – so that we can integrate the data that you collect, in order to see the full impact picture.
The combination of data captured through HAPI and from the organization allows us to highlight patterns in the correlations – rather than concluding a clear-cut cause and effect, because we know that the overall picture is interconnected and much more complex. The point is that it’s the combination of measuring all of those different data points together that gives HAPI strength.
3. Maximizing the potential for positive difference
HAPI includes practice reminders alongside impact questions. While the program is still underway, participants are asked about learning application, prompting them to think about impact throughout and at an earlier stage than they might otherwise.
By measuring impact in this way, it is more present and salient to participants and the organization. As an integrated process, the reminders to practice and impact survey are simultaneously measuring positive change and reinforcing the likelihood of that positive change happening.
“If we define impact as making a positive change, you're more likely to have that change when the learning is reinforced. If you make it more important in people's minds, you've got the opportunity to create more impact because it's front of mind rather than a learning event in isolation.”
4. Better, more reliable data through individual investment
Obtaining survey data at the end of a program is onerous on participants and rarely of any meaningful benefit to them. With HAPI, rather than filling in a survey that they’ll never see again, every participant can see and access their own impact data they record. HAPI creates personal investment, responsibility, ownership, and motivation to record the data – i.e. there’s something in it for them.
The result is that the qualitative data you can collect will be much richer and more valuable because the participant is more motivated to dedicate time to it. It also reduces the possibility of participant bias i.e. the perceived need for them to score highly to ‘look good’ to the organization and increase their chances of participating in future programs.
5. A true partnership approach
With an endeavor as complex as impact measurement, everything has to be planned – in partnership – from the outset. Led by your strategic objectives, our dedicated Assessments team of organizational psychologists are brought in to work out how you can measure your progress in achieving those goals.
In the program design phase, the cadence of profiling questions and reminders is intentionally set out from the beginning, and practically speaking, HAPI can be fit to any learning management system you may be using.
"Our philosophy is that we're all in it together. The participant, the client, and us – and we've all got to work on it. It's not ‘other’ to anyone. It's strength in numbers, and strength in the combination of data.”
6. Supporting the L&D leader to make better decisions
HAPI is designed to support the L&D leader to be able to report back to their business. Through an intuitive dashboard, the L&D leader can access cohort-level data, balancing clear-cut quantitative data with the powerful stories that come out of rich qualitative data to feed back into the organization.
If you’re interested in discussing learning impact for your organization and would like to find out more about HAPI, please contact us via this link and a member of our team will get back to you.
Meet the expert
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Anna Odumodu
VP Custom Solutions at Hult Ashridge Executive Education
As Head of Custom Solutions at Hult Ashridge, Anna brings over two decades of expertise in creating custom learning and development solutions that drive change and sustainable growth for organizations. Passionate about understanding and meeting client needs, her current focus is on measuring the impact of learning interventions. Drawing on 10 years as a civil engineer managing multi-million pound projects, Anna brings this rigor and structure to her L&D work. She holds an Executive MBA with Distinction from Bayes Business School.
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