"To do more of what is not working currently, is to do more of what will not work in the future. The curious thing is that the righter you do the wrong thing, the wronger you become." Russell Ackoff The lack of progress in corporate L&D is systemic. Look at the conference agendas, keynotes, podcasts, and book titles now and compare them to 15 years ago. Almost the same issues, word for word. There's a deep rooted status quo built around doing the wrong thing righter. Four of the most common examples, if you can't / don't / dare not see them: 1. Anything related to 'making training better' (because you probably didn't need a training solution in the first place). 2. Anything related to telling workers how they need to do more of what you're telling them to do - now termed 'Marketing for L&D' (because it probably isn't directly related to helping them do their job more effectively and to get what they want). 3. Anything related to

"In a system, the best way to treat a problem is seldom where the problem appears, because of the interaction of the parts." Donella H. Matthews The 'problems' in corporate learning are inevitably framed and defined by the people already in corporate learning. This group think leads to a familiar list of problems that inevitably can't be solved: 'We need a 'learning culture' 'We need to stop taking orders from 'the business'' 'We need to become performance led' 'We need to stop defaulting to training as the only solution' 'We need to stop creating more content' 'The new technology didn't deliver as promised.' These examples are not 'the problems' of course - they are symptoms - simply features of the current system.  Instead, we can choose to look at the interaction of the different parts of the system - that have created these outputs over time. These might include: How leaders have create

"You can get anybody to agree anything in a workshop but if you don't change the social context, it all changes when they get back (to work)." Dave Snowden We can shift the performance of organisations and potentially the performance of the individuals within it if we focus on the underlying system.  This would lead us to put effort, time and resources against: Challenging and evolving the assumptions and beliefs of leaders who own the system Choosing to re-imagine and reset organisational goals  Choosing to reset policies, process and measurement systems to enable the new organisational goals Choosing to change the current organisational rules around incentives and rewards to align with the new organisational goals  Choosing to change the way that information, ideas and feedback flows through the organisation. However, this is demanding, politically sensitive, 'risky', long term, collaborative work. (And mostly counter intuitive to industrial leaders who benefit