Founding Director ·
# Augmenting Your Future Workforce
This is the eighth in a series exploring how organisations can build capability that lasts.
In the last post I argued that data should guide human judgement, never replace it. A British general once defined good judgement as the ability to make sound decisions on imperfect information. The trouble today is rarely too little data — it is too much. So the real question becomes: which slice of it do you actually trust to steer by? The answer, almost always, is context.
Design earns the outcome, not delivery
One of my firmest convictions after 25 years building Mission Performance is that design matters as much as delivery — often more. The contextual understanding you build, and the system you launch a programme into, is the thing that decides whether it works. Skip that step and it barely matters how polished the design or how slick the delivery: you will not reach the outcome you were engaged to reach.
When “they’ve been trained” is a warning, not a reassurance
This non-specific approach is usually a symptom of tick-box thinking. It starts life in compliance, where completion is the point, but it creeps quietly into behavioural change, where completion is nothing of the sort. When someone tells me their people “have been trained”, I have learned to hear it as a red flag. It tends to signal a shallow cycle of design, delivery and sustainment, with the hardest part — sustaining the learning in the flow of work and pinning it to precise outcomes — missing altogether.
When a culture accepts that as normal, the alarm bells should ring. I have sat in plenty of rooms where exactly that level of mediocrity was simply the water everyone swam in. Resetting those expectations — showing what well-designed, well-delivered, well-sustained development can genuinely produce — remains some of the most satisfying work we do.
The training thermostat
A recent example. We worked with an organisation whose training thermostat was set to a fixed temperature: pull people off the job for three hours, march them through fifty-plus slides, call it training. Small wonder the needle never moved while engagement sagged and churn sat at record highs. We reset the thermostat — showed them what a different approach could achieve — and, to their credit, they listened and adopted it for their flagship locations.
You change a setting like that with a reasoned argument, not a glib cost-benefit sum. We borrow an outcome-based logic from health care: define the outcome first, then design the intervention to reach it, then measure against it. Anchoring a programme to a defined set of outcomes inside a specific context is the superpower here. It is what actually shifts behaviour.
There are no perfect conditions
There is no ideal set of conditions in which behavioural change simply takes root. Every client brings its own operational constraints, and those constraints are not obstacles to design around later — they are the design brief.
Take professional services. Leaders there are expected to keep fee-earning while they develop, which places hard limits on how you can deliver. Underplay that reality and you quietly cap the outcomes you can achieve. So you deliver in the flow of work instead: you build the client’s internal capability to run Action Learning sessions, you place specialist coaches alongside to develop the core skills, and you let advisors and participants wring every last drop of value from the time they already spend together. Done at scale and to a standard, the effect is significant — because real business gets done in the heart of the interaction, not in spite of it.
A good plan executed now beats a perfect plan too late
A word of caution the other way. Analysis paralysis limits outcomes just as surely as carelessness does. If every variable has to be isolated and every element mapped before anything can begin, you have simply swapped one failure for another. There is a well-worn piece of military wisdom that a good plan executed now beats a perfect one executed too late. Fix on the main priorities and the key lagging indicators, apply Pareto, and get moving.
The precision you are after does not come from measuring everything. It comes from identifying the causal factors behind the outcome you actually want, and building a plan good enough to reach it. Get the context right and the content very nearly designs itself.
