Building skills and capabilities for a changing world

The heart of the problem in developing new organisational skills and capabilities, is that people default to doing what they know, especially when what they know has served them well in the past.

Think of the fundraiser who can predict the ROI of a DM campaign but not what a new digital fundraising approach might offer, or the support worker who knows the deep value of the conversation they have with a helpline caller but feels anxious about the idea of co-creating with that same service user, or the leader who sees that organisational silos are a problem but is in their comfort zone managing ‘their team’ of discipline experts.

As a change-ready leader, you recognise the need for transformation yet struggle to shift organisational capabilities to deliver that change. Your own experience of the skills you’re seeking may be limited, having never been explicitly taught them. And you’re operating within a risk-averse governance model where these competencies are also scarce. You may be facing the persistent assumption that approaches effective in a more stable past remain suitable for today's volatile environment. And perhaps underneath is a quiet personal fear about whether you possess sufficient knowledge or confidence to model the changes you wish to see—all while facing the implicit expectation that senior leaders should somehow possess all the answers.

The traditional response to organisational capability development has been to delegate it to HR and L&D teams. This leads too often to a narrow focus on training people in established disciplines, doing traditional ‘management development’, or seeing ‘digital transformation’ skills as being about teaching people to use new tools. Capability development for transformation requires both a different kind of skillset and mindset. AND to see those skills modelled by the leaders of the organisation. It cannot be delegated to teams to build from bottom-up, or kept in a separate ‘transformation’ silo.