"It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it." Upton Sinclair The two convenient load bearing myths in workplace 'Learning and Development' are linked: 'Formal learning (education)' and  'Skills' Both are the least likely cause of a 'performance' problem Both (therefore) provide the lowest opportunity for impact However... Both remain the 'go to' priorities for the workplace 'Learning and Development' industry because: Leaders continue to love the idea of 'building skills' and 'investing in education' as both of these require little or no commitment on their part. L&D teams and their vendor whisperers rely on the commercial safety that the status quo continues to provide.  There are many other areas that could be the focus - with greater to opportunities to affect performance outputs: Expectations Incentives and rewards Ongoing feedback Reso...

"It probably doesn't pay to argue over things we have chosen to believe as part of our identity." Seth Godin Places to hide inside a control based bureaucracy: Status Tactics Tools (includes all technologies) Processes Policies Hierarchies Meeting protocols Slide deck protocols Budgeting  Current measures Lack of current measures.

"It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design he system properly to make sure that performers can leverage all their capabilities." Klaus Wittkuhn By definition the role, focus and measures for corporate 'L&D' aren't focused on systems change. The priorities remain as: educate individuals in order to create more standardised workers. who will then perform better individually and the individual improvements will sum up to a higher performing organisation (see how that sounds?...). So the perfect recipe for inertia remains in place: Leaders continue to create transactional. low EQ environments (their systems) Corporate Learning don't have a systems change oriented philosophy or (therefore) a coherent strategy that can enable progress.  

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." Maslow  I've talked before about how control based organisations approach 'defining' and 'deploying' their  values . The same is often true for 'our new culture': Create statements describing 'how it is here now' (inputs) In reality these statements are (random) target outputs The real challenge? - deliberately adjusting the system (the choice of measures, incentives, rewards, strategy, enabling policies, enabling processes, enabling team structures etc.) that might allow the new target culture to emerge over time.