" The purpose of an organisation is to enable its members to achieve better together than they can apart. " Rob England What many (most) organisations need to achieve 'better together': A recognition of interconnectedness  A focus on enabling environments conducive to ideas and contribution from all  More openness to uncertainty and ambiguity Clarity of deliberate strategic choices - and their associated trade offs Leadership as accountability for indentifying and facilitating people to fulfil their potential  Diversity as creating value from people's experience and ideas  What many (most) organisations do instead : Incentivise and reward individual contribution Trade in busyness and solutionism Linear thinking (the path of least resistance) Leadership as status and directing Reward transacting and compliance. 

"The problem of people not working together won't be solved by interventions such as team-working, participation, empowerment programmes and the like, for one simple reason: it is the system that governs behaviour." John Seddon  The corporate education model enabled by 'L&D' teams is structurally 'product' led: Training courses Development programmes 'Interventions' 'Learning' 'content' / content libraries. This mindset, and its supporting infrastructure and operating model of: received 'learning objectives' course design 'engagement and marketing' efforts measurement of activity and reaction (noise). All inevitably reinforce the separation between 'Learning' and enabling the specific standards required for work and its outputs (performance). But here's the rub - once we acknowledge that the answers for performance change are always systemic and emergent - then the whole corporate education super

"In other words, if already processing information in biased ways, the new information is just more fuel for the fire. Further, if the new information dis-confirms current beliefs, this will often trigger defense mechanisms. When conflicting evidence generates cognitive dissonance, people will often argue against it just to make themselves feel better. They may the even rehearse better defenses against future such challenges to their views." Charles Lambdin If a leader's world views have been shaped by a transactional focus on process 'delivery', dutifully reacting, and standardisation - then only training programs will continue to appeal. And, if a leader's world views have been shaped by the belief that they should 'drive results' and 'hold people to account', then the idea that others (the 'L&D' team, or the 'People Capability' team) are responsible for enabling performance will not appeal.  (And so reinforce corporate L

"Changing people and putting them back in the same environment is not transformative" John Atkinson Three examples of policy and process (systemic) changes needed to enable a transition to a ' Skills led ' organisation: 1. Resetting the expectations - and enabling processes, incentives and rewards for every line manager towards enabling the application of new skills in context: - Providing opportunities to practice (and fail) - Providing space for ongoing reflection on the application of the new skills - Providing space for ongoing, two-way feedback on the application of the new skills - Defining and evolving new performance expectations for their team members - ' what outcomes do we want as new skills are applied in practice in the work? ' 2. Deriving 'skills' definitions from the performance requirements of a role (i.e. applying the skills to perform actions  ('performance standards') in the right context to produce outputs to achieve agreed