"Leaders, lifelong learners, learning organisations, learning cultures ... the rhetoric is deafening. In practice this means more 'courses'." Donald Clark Most investments in organisational learning (courses and programmes) are performative theatre. To enable genuine, sustainable, performance change, shift focus towards: Creating and incentivising social structures that accelerate collaborative problem solving Defining the new capabilities now needed for the organisation to become 'future fit' Deliberately adjusting goals, incentives, rewards, structures, rules, processes and information flows (AKA 'the system') to enable the new capabilities to emerge and establish Facilitating new connections and team working Prioritising creation of more capacity for questions and reflection Challenging and supporting leaders (raised on process compliance and contracting out responsibility for peoples' development) to redefine 'learning' beyond (just) at...

"The recipe for workplace despair is having high expectations for performance in a system that erodes well-being and extracts the energy needed to "perform". Zach Mercurio Here a some ingrained organisational culture norms that are mostly invisible to leaders and prevent 'cultures of learning': 1. Worshipping individual performance (= individualising systemic problems) 2. "Performance" (really) equates to 'level of compliance and acceptance' (working with the system) 3. Hiring and organising for 'cultural fit' (reinforcement) 4. Absence of inquiry (status roles limit questions and challenge) 5. 'High potentials' ethos (special treatment for the special people) 6. Work and learning viewed as separate entities ('work' means 'delivery', 'learning' means 'training') 7. Processes organised to maintain separation between the 'thinkers' and the 'doers' (status roles).

"Your worldview determines what problems you believe are important to solve, which, in turn, points you towards certain principles and away from others. Principles get operationalised in processes which shape everyday practices (behaviours), and ultimately determine performance." Gary Hamel It's the underpinning assumptions and beliefs of the leaders (their 'worldview') that inform business models and operating models (" The business / organisation we will be! ..."). Common assumptions and beliefs that determine priorities for industrial leaders often include: 1. ' My previous experience equips me to accurately predict the future .' 2. Success comes from directing and pace setting 3. Desired results can be achieved through process management  4. High performance means high compliance 5. Change needs to be 'driven through' an organisation 6. 'Learning' (only) = 'being trained'. So organisational cultures are outcomes (thin...

"All these executives going around talking about the need for innovation and increasing agility while pushing an out-of-date command-and-control structure focusing on efficiency aren't going to get agility of innovation." Charles Lambdin OLD industrial era value-creating organisational capabilities: 1. Control 2. Standardisation 3. Incremental improvement 4. Compliance 5. Consistency NEW digital era value-creating organisation capabilities: 1. Receptiveness to continuous change (market, customer, employee contexts) 2. Connectivity across teams 3. Access to exemplary performers (internal and external) 4. Agency and autonomy 5. Inquiry and reflection

"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...