Customer Story: READY-SET-GO-SHOW

Most training doesn’t work. Geoff Rip identified this early in his career as National Training Manager for two retail companies — and spent the next two decades building a methodology designed to fix it.

The problem, as he saw it, wasn’t the content. It was the structure. Training was treated as an event. People arrived unprepared, sat through sessions, and went back to work with no support to apply what they’d learned. The behaviour change that training was supposed to create rarely materialised.

His answer was READY-SET-GO-SHOW: a four-phase model that treats training as a connected journey from preparation through to proven on-the-job application.

The four phases

READY is about learner mindset — not content. Before any learning begins, participants are primed for what’s coming, connecting prior experience to what they’re about to learn and building genuine accountability for applying it.

SET is the training itself — face-to-face, online, or a combination. But critically, it’s framed as preparation for what comes next, not as the destination.

GO is where the real work happens. Participants return to the workplace to apply their learning, with structured support and reinforcement activities to ensure the knowledge sticks and translates into changed behaviour.

SHOW requires participants to report back on how they’ve applied their learning — using the SHOW acronym (Situation, How, Outcome, Wisdom) — providing organisations with direct evidence of behaviour change at Kirkpatrick levels 3 and 4.

COVID as a catalyst

Before 2020, Geoff’s programs ran largely face-to-face. When COVID ended that, he didn’t see it as a setback — he saw it as the moment to do what he’d wanted to do for years: take the READY-SET-GO-SHOW methodology fully into blended learning and prove it delivered even better outcomes in a connected online format.

After evaluating platforms against a clear set of criteria — the ability to support an ongoing learner journey, capture both asynchronous and in-person activity in one place, and report on training outcomes — Geoff selected Tribal Habits. The speed of content creation, the quality of the learner interface and the responsiveness of local support were decisive.

One platform, end to end

The key to making the blended model work was keeping everything in one place. Self-paced pre-work, digital workbooks used during virtual sessions, on-the-job activities in the GO phase and SHOW submissions — all captured within Tribal Habits, creating a single continuous record of each participant’s learning journey.

The familiarity participants built during the self-paced phases carried directly into the virtual sessions. There was no friction of switching platforms, no lost context, no disconnect between what happened online and what happened in the room.

Geoff also found creative ways to use the platform’s AI voices — giving them distinct personalities, introducing them as co-facilitators, and using their naturally direct delivery style to land points that would have felt blunt coming from a human. It became one of the program’s most memorable features.

Proving it works

The SHOW phase transformed what Geoff could demonstrate to clients. Rather than relying on post-training surveys — which he knew had no correlation with behaviour change — he was collecting structured evidence of how participants were applying their learning in the workplace, weeks after the sessions had finished.

Formative feedback collected throughout the program allows Geoff to identify where modules need refinement and spin up new content quickly when gaps emerge. Summative assessment provides formal proof of understanding. Together, they give client organisations a level of visibility into training effectiveness that standalone courses simply can’t deliver.

The result is a methodology that not only works better, but can now prove that it does.