You run a quarterly engagement survey. It says people do not feel heard. You and your boss sit down to make sense of it and the whiteboard fills up fast: no culture of listening, not enough channels to speak up, managers who need to listen better, a loop you never closed from last time, leadership that is not visible enough, a hybrid-workplace thing, low psychological safety. You pick the two…

What Ford’s turnaround really reveals about crisis, assumptions, and the limits of culture programs In 2006, Ford was close to collapse. It was about to report a loss of $12.7 billion, the worst single year in its history, and over the next three years it would lose more than $30 billion. The company had become a set of warring fiefdoms. Regional divisions ran their own strategies and products. Executives guarded…

It’s been 45 years since George T. Doran gave us the SMART framework. So why are we still struggling with the basics? Last month, a practice leader – someone responsible for a team of fifty – reached out to me with a familiar request. “We need an L&D intervention on SMART goals,” she said. “I’ve sent multiple reminders. I’ve flagged that the goals people are submitting aren’t SMART. They’re still…

Eight weeks without a job title made me question where meaning actually lives. I resigned five weeks ago. Three weeks remain. There is a role waiting on the other side, but right now, in the middle of this notice period, I am sitting on my couch with a show playing on my tablet and a laptop open that nobody has asked me to use.

Everyone in L&D knows the 70:20:10 model. Seventy per cent of professional development happens through on-the-job experience. Twenty per cent through social learning – mentoring, feedback, observation. Ten per cent through formal training (Lombardo & Eichinger). The profession has spent decades building ever-better interventions for the 10 per cent: workshops, e-learning, leadership programmes, competency frameworks, evaluation models. It has influenced the 20 per cent through coaching schemes and mentoring programmes.…

Part 2 of the Cracks in the Ladder series. Everyone’s investing in AI capability. Almost nobody is investing in protecting the human intelligence that AI is quietly replacing. Not because they don’t care – it’s because the skills most at risk are the ones hardest to identify. Not every routine task is just a routine task.

Part 6 of a series on what working across five radically different organizations taught me about the real competency behind HR effectiveness. I started this series with a story about an LMS that succeeded technically and failed politically. Over the five pieces that followed, I traced a pattern across five organizational archetypes: an offshore consulting firm, a Maharatna PSU, a central government ministry, a domestic consulting practice, and a PE-backed…

Part 5 of a series on contextual intelligence in HR leadership. Every organization I had worked in before this one had rewarded thoroughness. At the offshore consulting firm, thoroughness was the baseline expectation. At the PSU, thoroughness earned respect, even when I failed on other dimensions. At the government ministry, thoroughness was what made the policy drafts defensible. At the domestic consulting firm, thoroughness was what made clients trust me…

Part 4 of a series on contextual intelligence in HR leadership. At the offshore consulting firm where I started my career, I was visible. I knew this at the time, and I attributed it to the quality of my work. My deliverables were sharp, my timelines were reliable, my frameworks were well-received. The feedback loop between effort and recognition was tight. I produced good work, and people noticed.

Why most competency frameworks collapse – and why the fix isn’t what you think In twelve years of building competency frameworks across consulting, the public sector, and corporate environments, I have rarely seen one sustain cross-functional use. Frameworks get approved, socialised, and documented – but they do not get used. They exist as artefacts, not as operating systems.