"If you just want someone to reflect what you say, it is far more cost effective to replace a senior manager with a full-length mirror." Rishad Tobaccowala Three key opportunities for L&D leaders in 2021: Re-positioning 'L&D' as an organisational priority Connecting insights and foresight to sharpen leaders' focus and prioritisation Developing new commitment and engagement with and from leaders Aligning 'learning' directly to business strategy and the ability to compete in complexity Linking the value of 'learning' to organisational development and culture change Helping the whole organisation to take responsibility for continual learning. Becoming more confident in the commercial context Understanding the commercial context within which the organisation seeks to create value Understanding and connecting brand and business goals - and the trade offs being made Understanding the business model, the organisational model and the management mod

"Narrative strategy is a 21st century skill." Tom Critchlow "Narrative (noun) - a story or a description of a series of events." Corporate 'L&D' teams continue to struggle with 'buy-in' because they continue to struggle with narrative . This is now mission critical because optimising instructional design tactics is not enough to build leverage and affect the organisational culture.  So, the L&D team needs to forge a new, compelling, actionable vision of the different future it seeks for the organisation. It then needs to tell this story in every interaction and through every deliverable .  Some inputs into the new, compelling, actionable vision of the different future the L&D function seeks for the organisation might include: "This is how our business uniquely creates value for our customers today..." "This is what's changing in our market and for our customers and why. This will impact the way our business creat

"The first step in changing a culture is to understand how a leaders' thinking currently drives the system and how, therefore it currently drives performance." Vanguard Consulting There is a deeply entrenched three-way standoff between the untapped opportunity for businesses to embrace continual learning, the fears that prevent (many) leaders from committing to this and the way the role of the 'L&D' function is positioned.  Having worked in and around this phenomenon for a number of years, I reflect that there are cognitive biases at play - for both leaders and their L&D teams. Here's my list of examples: 'Status quo bias' - The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same (see also 'loss aversion' and 'system justification').  'System justification' - The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometime