Tiny topics

The better question is the one people actually face at work: what do I do when someone hands me a bottle of wine after a site visit? When a renewable energy client came to us, they had two policies - Gifts and Benefits, and Anti-Bribery and Corruption - and a clear brief. Build something their team would actually use when the moment arrived. Not a slide deck. Not a quiz. A module that prepared people to make the call. Here's how we approached it. We started with the decisions

A few weeks ago, I shared a reflection inspired by Trevor Ragan’s [tag] idea that if someone can get better at it, it’s a skill. That framing has stayed with me, because once you see work through a skills lens, you start asking better questions. Trevor talks about the importance of “zooming out” and “zooming in”. Zoom out to see the broad direction. Zoom in to make it actionable. Let’s take something many organisations prioritise: “We need stronger stakeholder management

Last week I shared this idea: Compliance isn’t a topic. It’s a set of skills. Here’s what that looks like in practice. When Lion set out to strengthen financial governance as part of a broader transformation, the ambition wasn’t “better compliance”. It was clearer ownership. Stronger accountability. Fewer financial surprises. Those outcomes don’t change, however, because people read a framework; they change when behaviour changes. So, instead of designing learning around

We talk about things like “communication skills”, “leadership capability” and “relationship management” in broad strokes. But no one improves at “communication”. They improve at asking better questions. Or handling objections. Or giving feedback without triggering defensiveness. The same thing happens in compliance learning. Organisations say they want to: Build governance capability. Improve risk awareness. Strengthen accountability. All important. All necessary. But

Recently, I read an article by Trevor Ragan that put language around something I’ve thought for years, and it reinforced it beautifully: If someone can get better at it, it’s a skill. When you start looking at the world through that lens, everything shifts. Struggling to stay calm in a tense meeting? Skill. Avoiding a difficult conversation? Skill. Receiving feedback without becoming defensive? Skill. Building trust across functions? Skill. We often label these thin

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been returning to the same conclusion: innovation is a learning outcome. Want an example that explains my thinking? One of the most well-known corporate transformations of the last decade didn’t start with strategy. It started with learning. When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft, the organisation was struggling with silos, internal competition and slow innovation. The shift that followed wasn’t driven by a new operating model alone; it was