Tiny topics

Think about how a cardiac technician learns to read an ECG. Not by reading a chapter on what the waveforms mean. You could memorise every pattern in the textbook and still freeze the first time a real trace is in front of you and a decision has to be made. You learn by reading ECGs. One after another. Making the call, finding out whether you were right, and reading the next one. That's the gap most training steps around. We confuse covering the content with building the capab

It sounds like a semantic question. It isn't. A role is a job title with a set of assumed responsibilities attached to it. A skill is something a person can demonstrably do, get better at, and apply across more than one context. Job descriptions describe roles. They rarely describe what someone can do. That gap is why so many organisations are shifting toward skills-based structures; not because "skills-based" is trending, but because roles are changing faster than the docume

That's not a technology problem. It's a learning one. The licences get bought. The tools get switched on. The dashboard lights up with adoption numbers. And everyone assumes the capability arrived with the subscription. It didn't. Deloitte's 2026 research found the AI skills gap - not the technology - is now the single biggest barrier to getting value from AI. And according to Accenture, only around a quarter of workers have had any training on how to work alongside it. So, w

The space between those two words is where most L&D budgets quietly die. I spent twenty years in finance before I designed a single learning module. It teaches you one thing fast: a number only matters if someone changes a decision because of it. Everything else is noise on a slide. Most learning measurement is noise on a slide. According to ATD and the ROI Institute, 94% of organisations track learning inputs: attendance, completions, satisfaction scores. Only 8% measure whe

But you can design it out of them, and a lot of workplace learning does exactly that. Think about how most change lands at work. It's pushed. This is happening, here's the deadline, here's the module, tick it off by Friday. Push gets you compliance. It rarely gets you commitment. People do the minimum the mandate requires and slide back to the old way the moment no one's watching. Curiosity is the opposite. It's a pull. People move toward a new way of working when they want t

About eighteen months ago I stopped colouring my hair. I'm still in the in-between stage. The part you’re warned about but don’t fully appreciate until you’re there, where it looks worse before it looks better. So why am I still doing it? Two reasons – and they're the same two that decide whether any change sticks. Curiosity. I wanted to know what was underneath. What I'd actually look like on the other side. That pull kept me going when the mirror wasn't giving me much back.