Capability leaders - expose your mental models to the light of day

"That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to me a major breakthrough for building learning organisations."

Peter M. Senge

In most organisations the approach to enabling performance is implicit, vague, and generic. In many cases, there is a comfortable separation between work, performance, and learning. 

In order to challenge assumptions and priorities on all sides, capability professionals have to put their mental models out where others can see them.

Based on typical organisational capability strategies and tactics, these current mental models seem to include:

'We believe providing access to 'resources' materially changes how well people perform. This is how we measure and demonstrate this:'

'We believe attendance to training courses is the primary source improving an individuals' performance in their role. This is how we measure that impact:'

We believe training course attendees' high 'satisfaction' scores directly impact application of new ideas and skills back in their work. This is how we demonstrate this link:'

'We believe our formal learning curriculum has the biggest impact on individual and team performance. This is how we demonstrate this link:' 

Our 'learning technology' investments correlate with an improvement in business success metrics. This is how we demonstrate this alignment:'

In summary: get your model out there so that it can be viewed. Actively invite different people to reflect and challenge your current assumptions.

Making your choice of mental models as rigorous as possible, testing them against (new) evidence - and being willing to leave them behind if they are no longer supportable is the work of a capability professional.

(Why wouldn't you want to?).