"The only people I've ever met in my 40+ years in L&D who seem to have an insatiable appetite for more and more L&D, are clients who mistakenly believe that more content will address their performance problems." Guy W. Wallace  1. Re-balance investments more evenly between 'individual worker', 'teams', and 'the overall organisation' 2. Consider the nature of the work for which you are seeking to accelerate / support learning for; is it 'routine' work? 'complex' work? 'innovation' work? (the tactics employed will need to be different)  3. Re-balance investments more evenly between 'productive' learning - to support existing processes, usually focused on ensuring compliance and / or incremental improvements and  'generative' learning - to support discovery on next opportunities - focused on facilitating new ideas, connections, and possibilities 4. Re-balance investments based on whether the intent ...

"No amount of rhetoric, training or tools is going to make a significant difference if power isn't redistributed. This means making leaders meaningfully accountable to the led, and giving everyone the opportunity to not only speak their mind without risking their career, but also the agency to make change happen." Michele Zanini In control oriented, low EQ, 'delivery' focused work environments no one wants to look incompetent, negative, or ignorant. This inevitably promotes fear based responses from employees: Don't ask questions Don't offer new ideas Don't admit mistakes Don't question the status quo. Which is why it's easier for all involved to conflate ' learning culture ' with providing and consuming training - rather than the real work of changing the system.  

"The thing upper management wants most often is to speed 'delivery'. What they don't realise is that delivery speed is a systems issues. To speed delivery, you need to fix the entire system. They are part of that system, however, and are usually unwilling to be "fixed"." Allan Holub Industrial leaders remain fixated on the (lazy) premise that the way to build more valuable / valued / differentiated / sustainable / future-proofed organisations is to 'fix' individual workers.  This default traps L&D teams in low impact work: order taking, content design, events management, and (inevitably) self justifying 'client satisfaction' tracking schemes.  This creates a common challenge: L&D struggle to achieve meaningful impact on the performance of the organisation because they are tasked with doing low-impact work.  The common solution to this challenge is to find ways for L&D to do more of their low-impact work, faster through tec...

"The older and stale a company, the more legalistic it gets and the more "rules" or processes become the gods of the company. The managers that stick around like policing these rules and then if you try to be creative you quickly get educated about how things are done." Paul Millerd Most corporate L&D is performative theatre. Events management. Investing huge budgets in trying to improve the performance of individuals without a focus on systems change is just a cargo cult. How can leaders find the ambition to move the approach to enabling learning from transactional, control focused, and projectised? The status quo persists because execs, L&D leaders, and vendors all have too much to lose. Here's to new and better.

"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 ag...

"An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation." Donella H. Meadows The work of a corporate L&D team (its preoccupations, tactics, and success measures) is part of the organisational system ('how the work works here') and so a unilateral 'L&D Transformation' is almost impossible to achieve. Paradoxically, if an L&D team 'breaks out' and starts to operate in a new way that is counter to the prevailing system, this can actually reinforce their work as 'out of sight, out of mind' of senior management. Inevitably the system will eventually correct itself and this outlier team is usually 'reset' through restructuring / redundancies / budget cuts. NB. Transforming the role, focus and approach to corporate learning is an outcome of deliberately changing the prevailing system ('how the work works here'). Changing the prevailing system depends on an openness - and excitement - by management ...

"The Enterprise Leadership wants a Learning Culture? They are going to have to explain it, demand it, inspect for it, and hand out rewards and recognition when they see it, and punish the gatekeepers who are stopping it when they don't see it. Otherwise, it's just yada yada." Guy W Wallace A  balance of ' Experiences, Exposure, Education ' is a useful framework for ambitious L&D leaders choosing to be more than just passive internal training vendors. But enabling these three strategies needs considerable pre-work to ensure they can take hold and enable new performance in practice: 1. Setting new Expectations - influencing leaders to recognise and lead a new role for ongoing learning AS THE WORK for everyone at all levels.  (As opposed to 'learning' as a lazy shorthand for 'completing training' whilst we all carry on as before). And Deliberately creating a new Environment - Influencing leaders to see their role as responsible for creatin...

"If we have a system of improvement that is directed at the parts, taken separately, you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved. The performance of a system depends on how the parts fit, not how they act taken separately. " Russell Ackoff

"Consciously or unconsciously, leaders put in place structures and practices that make sense to them. These structures and practices correspond to their way of dealing with the world and means that an organisation cannot evolve beyond it's leadership's stage of development." Hermanni Hyytiala   Here are some barriers to progress that correspond with the way that many control oriented leaders deal with their world: Perpetuating a linear, directive, process oriented, bias... Maintains busyness as the key status enhancing characteristic of the system* Which reinforces an inability to create space for reflection, new opportunities and stopping 'old' things Which limits the ability to define the new characteristics of high performance as context shifts Which prevents agreement on the new conditions that need to be in place to enable these new characteristics Which reinforces the 'snow blindness' of attempting to move in a 'new direction' using the ...