DTB Services - Our Ideas

What I do want in this post is explore how one might approach structuring the curriculum of an organization. The goal of such a curriculum is to develop professionals in all types of roles, in such a way that performance at the top level or grade of that role type can be matched to a specific academic achievement level from a professional academic ...

Learning and development behavior of employees in organizations exists as part of the experience of meaningful jobs. Jobs are meaningful either because they were created, communicated and managed meaningfully or the incumbent finds the meaning in the role on their own. Meaningful jobs, by default, motivate continuing development. I think the practi...

This is a summary post that presents 5 other posts exploring how activities that derive their meaning from results directed at delivering clear value automatically activate learning behavior and thus agility. The more we are able to focus our expectations of people and teams on results and value, the more we will begin to see the ful...

Don't make your career goals about a job you want, instead focus on the type of value you want to bring, the type of results you want to achieve and the type of activities you like to engage in. Seek these out in whatever jobs at whatever level.  The following 30-second clips provide a quick overview of some ideas related to the roles people p...

I don't think you can do anything to impact an organization or change organizations by trying to change "the Organization." Granted the organization is an entity, a living organism and all that. However, I have heard people ascribe behavior to 'the organization' which I think is convenient but not effective when we are trying to impact change. For ...

As a teacher in a vocational school years ago, I remember the challenges that came with grading group projects. How do you decide who gets what grade especially when the level of contribution varies across members? I remember I always asked myself "why exactly did I give a group project?". Perhaps the way to assign grades is somewhere in the answer...

Development plans sound like a great idea but somehow installing this as a practice in organizations can sometimes be quite challenging. There is a tendency to focus so much on the 'template' that we forget the actions the template is supposed to scaffold and enable, and the results and value those actions are supposed to achieve and deliver. ...

I have spent a lot of time reflecting on how important it is for theory and practice to come closer. In recent years, t here seems to be an increase in focus on closer integration of theory with practice within a wide range of occupations which has increased the attention on the idea of scholar-practitioners. In a related capacity, there appears to...

  It is our belief that a lot of what we need to address the situations we encounter and achieve desired outcomes are available to us. The task before us often is whether we have the knowledge to ask the right questions that frame the situation in ways that activate the right skills to act and if so, do we possess the skills to perform the act...

First let's start with some basic definitions of common terms that we might be using in slightly different ways. We have a somewhat holistic view of learning and development which approaches objectives as shown in the table below:  The first important distinction is the use of only 2 categories of knowledge and skills, 1) professional domain w...

The challenge facing most learning and development organizations trying to be holistic in addressing the needs of the employees as individuals and the organization as a whole is the depth and breadth of knowledge and skills to be managed. All attempts so far tend to either focus on a few areas normally focused on the leadership domain, specifically...

There are 3 levels of knowledge & skills for both professional and leadership domains that we use to manage our approach to training products. They are presented in the table below: For the professional domain, we recommend building from top down, from generic to specific meaning global to local. This is because we believe the global industry p...

As we think about roles and jobs in the organisation, we consider what they will look like when viewed through the lenses of our frameworks. If you are unfamiliar with our frameworks or our approach to knowledge, skill and will, please see our earlier posts on this, specifically this one titled: Knowledge, Skill and Will - Applying Our Framework to...

  When the learning and talent development strategy focuses on creating a workplace environment that encourages and supports learning behaviour, the meaning employees associate with their jobs becomes an extremely important consideration and variable in the design of products and interventions. As reflected in this post " rethinking the role o...

In these series on performance, learning, talent in an organisational context, I have explored a lot of the key constructs that drive the learning behaviour in organisations. In this post, I go into a lot more detail covering the mechanisms by which these concepts operate as variables to drive learning behaviour in organisations and how to leverage these variables either as in individual, a manager or an executive to achieve desired results and deliver desired value. 

In previous posts under this same series, I shared a holistic overview of the framework and then proceeded to explore performance in more details. Now, in this post, I will explore the concepts of complexity and proficiency in more detail. 

Performance is a key construct that underpins a lot of what we try to do with people in organisations, yet the consistency of understanding needs to be signficantly improved if we are to truly leverage the human potential to perform. This is really about having a view of the different aspects of performance so that we can decide which ones we are targetting or expecting to be demonstrated either form ourselves or as managers or as the HR function supervising the process to make it fair and credible. 

You can watch the 30-second overview and then the full details.

I have always wondered why, in organizations, simple problems tend to go unresolved? Why do obvious opportunities remain under leveraged? Why does it seem like human beings at work are less capable than the same human beings at home?

While I am not suggesting that there is a simple way to solve these, I do believe there are some basic principles, that if consistently applied, might reduce their occurrence.