"Fragile, defensive, low EQ people in leadership positions suck the life out of any great employees. Companies that can't hire leaders well or get rid of bad ones are doomed." Galen Emanuele 'Collusion delusion' in organisational 'L&D' is a possibility; (' What we do with leaders and their teams hasn't worked so far but at some point something (magic?) could happen to change things .'). (This is system justification). Alternatively, organisational 'L&D' could be choosing to collude with leaders and their teams to perpetuate things they know won't work. (This is system dependency). Which is worse?

"The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We don't want our ideas changed." Frank Herbert In many organisations leaders don't have the vocabulary to describe actively enabling organisational learning beyond, "providing training". The challenge is to find the motivation and incentive to radically reconsider how leaders think about the role and priority of continual learning in the workplace. So a critical new role for ambitious 'L&D leaders' is to actively highlight the systemic barriers to continual learning in the organisation - and then dare and support leaders to choose to address these.

"We tend to focus in isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved." Peter Senge Most corporate training is signed off by people who don't want to know if it will work.

"I don't spend time anymore on elaborate plans or time lines. I want to use the time formerly spent on detailed planning to create the organisational conditions for people to set a clear intent, to agree on how they are going to work together, and then practice to become better..." Margaret J Wheatley An alternative way to agree where to put time and resources to enable an increased rate of continual learning: 1. Define how the organisation creates value  - and who for specifically 2. Define what is / will be unique and differentiating (AKA what is the valuable part?) 3. Identify the performance change needed from people to contribute to this; (how to maximise the valuable part) 4. Agree the type of work to be improved - that can have the biggest impact on the valuable part;  technical work?  adaptive work?  repeatable work?  complex work?  innovation work?  5. Align the most appropriate tactics and tools that can enable learning to support the agreed priority work.