Funding an experiential learning component means persuading someone who is weighing it against other spending. Uptime Institute publishes figures on the cost of outages and how often they result from staff not following the organization’s procedures. Training research explains why running the course again does little to change that, and simulation research is strong on mechanisms but says nothing about live IT operations. The other half of the issue is which budget the learning request goes to, because that determines what it’s measured against.
The budget line can decide the experiential learning outcome
Requests to fund an experiential learning component within an IT service management (ITSM) program are usually priced per head and charged against a training allocation that someone set at the start of the year, before anyone knew what the program would become.
The trouble starts there. A facilitated session for twenty people costs more than an e-learning license and a fraction of what two weeks of consulting costs. Hence, a budget holder who measures it against the license reaches a different answer than one who measures it against the consulting.
The framing therefore deserves as much thought as the evidence behind it, and the evidence is stronger than most people asking realize.
What the spend is protecting
Uptime Institute publishes an annual analysis of IT and data center outages. The 2026 edition reports that 57% of respondents to Uptime’s 2025 survey put the cost of their most recent major outage above $100,000, that one in five put it above $1 million for the second consecutive year, and that around one in ten said their last outage had serious or severe impacts. Uptime advises treating outage cost data skeptically, which is fair, since much of it is self-reported and organizations vary enormously in how they account for the cost. Even so, the numbers are large enough that the argument does not depend on their precision.
The 2025 edition delves deeper into the cause. Nearly 40% of organizations had suffered a major outage caused by human error in the previous three years, and 85% of those incidents traced back to staff failing to follow procedures or to flaws in the procedures themselves. The share of human-error outages attributable to staff not following procedures rose by 10 percentage points in a single year. Uptime concludes that improving documentation and process remains important, but that greater attention to staff training and real-time operational support may reduce the risk more effectively.
Those organizations had procedures in place, and the people involved had no shortage of documentation. What went wrong was that someone, under pressure, decided that following the procedure was not what the situation called for.
Why “We’ve already trained them” doesn’t close the argument
A budget holder will point out that the organization already pays for training on exactly these practices, and this is true. What happens to that spend afterward is well documented in the training literature. A 2025 paper in the International Journal of Training and Development reports that failure to apply newly acquired knowledge and skills at work is common, that unused skills decay quickly, and that estimates of how much learning is lost within a year of training run from roughly 50% to roughly 90%. The range is wide because transfer is hard to measure. Take the most generous end of it, and half of what was funded has stopped being used within twelve months.
That is not a criticism of the courses. Certification and classroom teaching build vocabulary and reference models, and an ITSM function without them faces a worse problem than the one described here. What they cannot do is hold recall and application together under pressure. A change practitioner can define change enablement accurately and still wave through a release on a Thursday afternoon, because the alternative is a conversation with a commercial director that nobody wants to have. Teaching the definition again doesn’t change that calculation.
What an experiential learning component adds
What the experiential learning format does that a course cannot is close the distance between a decision and its consequence. In a live operation, the release was waved through on Thursday, and the subsequent repeat incidents are spaced weeks apart, by which point the connection is arguable, and nobody is looking for it anyway. A “simulated year” puts both inside the same afternoon, in front of the person who made the call. This compression is the mechanism, and it is why judgment builds faster under it than under further instruction. Chernikova and colleagues found a large effect even when the control groups received other forms of instruction rather than nothing at all (g = 0.82).
Their data also indicate which skills the experiential learning format develops best, which is useful when deciding what a session should be built to do. Effects were largest for technical performance (g = 1.06) and for general problem solving (g = 0.88), followed by diagnosis (g = 0.82) and managing critical situations (g = 0.72). Communication and teamwork came out lower, at 0.44 and 0.50.
Simulations rated highly on authenticity outperformed low-authenticity ones (0.86 vs 0.58), and the effect for postgraduate and in-service learners was 0.91, slightly above the average across all 145 studies. For an ITSM audience, this pattern is encouraging, since service operations decisions are diagnostic and procedural before they are interpersonal, and a session built to resemble participants’ operating conditions is the version the evidence rates highest.
The limits of the evidence
The strongest available evidence for experiential learning is a meta-analysis by Chernikova and colleagues, published in Review of Educational Research in 2020. Across 145 empirical studies, simulation-based learning produced a large overall effect, g = 0.85, and the result held across domains including medical education, teacher education, and management. This work was done in higher education, where the outcomes measured were skill acquisition rather than operational performance.
No published study demonstrates that business simulations reduce outage rates or change failure rates in a live IT operation. Anybody presenting a modeled return on investment (ROI) for this is inventing the model, and a budget holder who has seen a few vendor business cases will recognize it.
What holds up under scrutiny is a smaller claim. Outages cost a great deal; the biggest human contribution is behavior rather than ignorance, and behavior does not reliably change with more instruction. That leaves experiential learning as the intervention with the strongest evidence for building judgment that works under pressure, which is an argument about probability, and the probability only has to shift a little for the spend to justify itself.
Which budget line the request belongs against
If the experiential learning component supports a platform implementation or a change in operating model, it belongs in the program budget as a readiness cost, alongside implementation and integration spend rather than against course fees. At that scale, the comparison is favorable enough that the conversation usually turns to scheduling rather than money.
If it is for operational teams outside a program, the comparison is with the cost of one avoided major incident. Set a day of a team’s time against the figures above and the arithmetic is not difficult, provided nobody overclaims what the intervention guarantees.
Two standard objections
The first objection is time off the desk. Taking an operational team out for a day during a period of high demand carries a real cost, and what that calls for is scheduling, not persuasion. A request that treats the timing as something to argue down rather than work around gets refused twice.
The second is the demand for proof. A budget holder asking to see the return before committing is reasonable, and the productive response is to commit to measurement rather than a projection. The commitment is one operational measure, chosen by the operations side rather than the training side, baselined before the session and reviewed at an agreed interval. Change failure rate, repeat incident volume, and time to restore are all already reported in most organizations. Hence, the measure costs nothing to collect, and the commitment is easy to hold you to.
What experiential learning will not fix
Experiential learning does not address constraints that are really about headcount, tooling, or authority. A service desk understaffed by four people has a resourcing issue. A change process that everybody circumvents because the change advisory board (CAB) meets every two weeks has a design issue. While a simulation will make that visible to the people who can fix it, the fix is still a redesign. If the leadership group whose decisions create the behavior will not attend, the value drops considerably, because the practitioners who do attend return to the same constraints they left.
3 example benefits of experiential learning
System change impact
Understanding the impact of a decision as part of a wider IT and business ecosystem, not just in the context of someone’s immediate area or knowledge (particularly with IT change), can greatly improve efficiency – reducing Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS) and the impact of poor IT change.
Accelerated outcomes
There’s quicker time to value for a change (as in program-based change). This comes from greater momentum and adoption reducing change friction, and better organizational (people) networks built during experiential sessions, leading to quicker, better decision-making.
Risk mitigation
From a financial perspective, reducing failure risk by optimizing program readiness and mitigating unnecessary friction is a key benefit.
Where the business case stands
The argument for investing does not rest on the claim that a single facilitated session transforms an operation. It rests on the documented facts that outages cost more than most learning budgets, that the largest human contribution to them is people not doing what they already know they should, and that instruction on its own has a poor record of changing that.
An experiential component is where practices are used against consequences rather than described, and it is the part of the curriculum that most ITSM programs leave out.
Experiential Learning Business Case FAQs
The program budget, if the session supports a platform implementation or an operating model change, where it counts as a readiness cost. The training allocation is the harder route because the comparison is against course fees rather than implementation spend or the cost of an incident.
Not credibly. No published research links business simulations to reduced outage or change failure rates in live operations. What can be done is to agree on one operational measure with a baseline before the session and review it afterward, which is a stronger commitment than a projection and easier for a skeptical budget holder to accept.
No. Certification and classroom teaching establish the vocabulary and the reference models that an experiential learning session then puts under pressure. The evidence supports this sequence.
For anything aimed at changing how an organization operates, yes. Practitioners return to the constraints their leadership sets, so a session that develops practitioners’ judgment without engaging the people who create those constraints will deliver less than it should.
If the constraint is headcount, tooling, or authority, deal with that first. If people know the practices, can describe them accurately, and still do something different when the pressure is on, that is the issue experiential learning addresses.
The ideal outcome is when the theory education element and the experiential learning are designed and scheduled together as part of one program, with a focus on an optimal readiness outcome upfront, not retrospectively.
Henry Strouts
Henry Strouts is a co-founder and Director of SXP Limited, a software business that develops serious games and business simulations that raise situational awareness and breakthrough understanding of new models and ways of working, including best practice frameworks and enterprise software solutions. Henry has been developing and delivering experiential learning for 30+ years, working with teams and executives to drive performance outcomes, whether in support of technology sales or organizational transformation. He has worked with many of the world’s largest vendors and enterprises, and his extensive industry knowledge supports the creation of highly relevant, business-issue-focused simulations designed to resonate with the transformation challenges organizations face today.
