I worked in recruitment briefly. I wasn’t very good at it and had an annoying habit of telling people they’d probably be better off working elsewhere which didn’t endear me to my bosses at the time.

But I do remember the phrase ‘Recruit for attitude, train for skill’ being drummed into me (although it was then largely ignored in practice).

It’s one of tho...

Workplace conflict takes up far too much time, energy and trust.

Employees spend nearly 2.8 hours per week dealing with workplace conflict, amounting to 385 million working days

For many organisations, measuring learning starts and stops with completion rates:

How many people started a course?

How many completed it? Did everyone pass?

These simple metrics are easy to capture and simple to report but they don’t tell us much about whether or not learning really made an impact.

I used to start in the same place a lot of L&D teams do.

I’d review training requests coming through our system and regularly sit down with capability leads to ask the question: “What training does your team need?”.

And every time, I’d get a long list back. On the surface, it looked useful. People were engaged, requests were coming in and lear...

Philosopher Karl Popper described the world as being made up of clocks and clouds. Clocks are predictable and structured whilst clouds are messy, evolving and hard to pin down.

In organisations, most change is treated like a clock – something we can plan, sequence and deliver. We convince ourselves that with the right plan (often beautifully crafted and presented) w...