The science behind Wundo.

Leadership is Your Strongest Lever for Success

According to the Vlerick & Hudson HR Barometer (2024 & 2025), leadership development is the number one priority for HR directors. Both research and practice show that leaders create a ripple effect across organizations. Leadership behavior strongly influences:

  • Employees — their wellbeing (Montano et al., 2017), motivation (Kim, Beehr & Prewett, 2018), performance (Montano et al., 2017; Schyns & Schilling, 2013), and personal development (Kleine, Rudolph & Zacher, 2019).

  • Learning, safety, and innovation — the degree to which employees learn (Koeslag-Kreunen et al., 2018), pursue safety (Lyubykh et al., 2022), and innovate (Lee et al., 2020).

  • Team dynamics and performance (Burke et al., 2006; Ceri-Booms et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2014).

  • Organizational culture and performance (Wang et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2015), especially during times of change, when leadership at every level becomes essential (Oreg & Berson, 2019).

As such, leadership is truly your strongest lever for success.

Challenges in Leadership Development

Despite its importance, several recurring challenges limit the impact of leadership development initiatives:

  1. Limited follow-up after training
    Leadership training often happens in classrooms, with little ongoing support once participants leave. There’s a growing need to embed development in the flow of work—within leaders’ daily reality, close to their real challenges and decisions.

  2. Knowledge retention
    According to the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve (Murre & Dros, 2015), people forget up to 80–90% of what they learn within 30 days if they don’t actively apply it. This means that without follow-up, most training impact fades quickly.

  3. The knowing–doing gap
    Even when leaders know what to do, taking consistent action remains difficult (Ahmadi & Vogel, 2023). Factors like workload, self-confidence, and motivation often stand in the way.

  4. Lack of impact measurement
    Evaluation often stops at smile sheets (participant satisfaction). However, measuring learning transfer (what leaders actually do differently) and business impact (effects on HR or performance KPIs) is often missing. This creates a significant data gap.

In addition, organizations face growing pressure to achieve scalability (reaching more leaders efficiently) and to use L&D budgets more strategically.

Meet Wundo

We believe leadership development can be done differently.

Wundo is a digital companion for leaders—built on how people actually learn.

Push: proactive learning support

Wundo proactively reaches out to leaders with:

  • bite-sized content for repetition,

  • action prompts (e.g., simulations), and

  • follow-ups on previous actions or intentions (Cromley & Chen, 2025; Johnson et al., 2012; Güntner et al., 2025; Haunstrup & Jensen, 2024)

Pull: learning in the flow of work

Leaders can also ask Wundo specific, real-time questions:

“Tomorrow I have to deliver bad news to a difficult employee. How should I approach this? Can I simulate the conversation safely first?” (Passmore, Tee & Rutschmann, 2025)

Designed for Learning Transfer

Wundo is built for learning transfer, by design, combining science-based principles and real-world experimentation.

  • Grounded in academic research on how people learn and how leaders develop (Blume et al., 2019; Ford et al., 2018; Lacerenza et al., 2017).

  • Continuously optimized through A/B testing and in-product experiments to match leaders’ needs, challenges, and maturity levels.

  • Supported by data dashboards showing engagement, activity types, and development areas linked to a validated leadership model.

Wundo also applies goal-setting principles to help leaders act on their learning goals (Johnson et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2021) and fosters reflection, self-efficacy, and a learning orientation (Chung et al., 2022; DeRue & Wellman, 2009).

Recent studies show that dynamic, just-in-time, action-based learning approaches like Wundo’s are highly effective in boosting learning transfer (Güntner et al., 2025; Haunstrup & Jensen, 2024).

Supporting the Human Side of Learning

Wundo also integrates emotional regulation and social support, two critical factors for sustainable learning transfer (Mehner, Rothenbusch & Kauffeld, 2025; Vongswasdi et al., 2025).
Leaders don’t just receive cognitive cues—they’re supported in managing the emotional and relational dynamics of their development journey.

All learning content and interventions are aligned with Yukl’s (2012) leadership behavior taxonomy, which includes four clusters:

  • Task-oriented

  • Relationship-oriented

  • Change-oriented

  • External-oriented behaviors

This ensures that every Wundo interaction systematically supports behavioral change in key leadership domains.

And because Wundo lives where leaders already work—in MS Teams and WhatsApp—there’s no need for new apps or LMS logins.

In sum, Wundo creates personalized leadership impact, at scale.

The Team Behind Wundo

Wundo is powered by a team combining data science, research, and AI expertise.

The founding team includes Toon Devloo, Michiel Crommelinck, and Timothy Desmet, all with strong academic backgrounds, and Bram Roets, an AI and technology expert.

In September 2025, Dr. Tina Davidson (PhD in Leadership from Vlerick Business School; former Professor at Erasmus School of Management, Rotterdam) joined the team to further strengthen Wundo’s scientific foundation.

References

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Chung, S., Zhan, Y., Noe, R. A., & Jiang, K. (2022). Is it time to update and expand training motivation theory? A meta-analytic review of training motivation research in the 21st century. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(7), 1150-1179. 

Cromley, J. G., & Chen, R. (2025). A Meta-Analysis of Richard Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Research: Searching for Boundary Conditions of Design Principles Across Multiple Media Types. Educational Research Review, 100730.

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