Someone in the presentation suggested not training a control group for the sake of comparative measurement. In real life, all business decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty. The business environment is always changing. Extraneous factors are always muddying results. Even if one could conduct business in a vacuum, outcomes would be subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that the very act of observation changes what s being observed.
Senior managers make decisions on the basis of logical argument supported by reasonable assumptions.
To make your case, you state your assumptions. Throughout TechLearn, many speakers instructed participants to talk in business terms, as if this alone if enough to open the purse strings. Don t buy it. Learning to talk ROI will no more make you an effective business people than learning French will turn you into a Frenchman. Selling the value of training interventions is not a matter of using a business framework to justify a project.