"The reason why we don't see the source of our problems is that the means by which we try to solve them are the source." David Bohm A shout out to a tweet from the always inspirational John Cutler on this blog... I’ve used these questions before giving L&D teams advice: Is there a ‘learning strategy’? Is it reasonable? Is the strategy explicitly or implicitly communicated? Is the structure of the L&D team aligned with the strategy? Sometimes you get lucky. There’s a reasonable learning strategy. A reasonable structure. The key issue is to make the strategy explicit . The hardest to unpack is actually an implicit, not-great strategy with a tightly coupled (“optimised”) structure… An interesting situation is when the learning strategy is in flux... The L&D structure is aligned around the “old” strategy. Which was implicit. The new strategy is understood at a high level, but the details are murky. This is SO confusing. It is uncomfortable. To start ... is it a le

"The status quo of organised learning benefits those who benefit from the status quo." Beth Salyers Three reflections on my experience of annual L&D investment planning: 1. Most corporate learning strategies are built around control and looking backwards 2. L&D leaders rarely (if ever) describe the trade offs they are making when deciding on an investment plan 3. Even in 'sophisticated' organisations most learning strategies are a collection of to-do lists Two questions to help you reflect on whether your L&D function is playing on 'defence' or 'offence': 1. How much of your L&D investment is currently driven by? - The business reacting to external events? - Cost reduction initiatives? - Digitisation of existing business processes? - 'Standardisation' projects? - Compliance audit risks? 2. What proportion of your L&D priorities are enabled through these strategy choices? - Standardising fixed skills for individual roles? - E