SOBRE ESTE EPISÓDIO
Your programme ran well. People learnt something new. Then they went back to their desks, and six months later nothing has changed. Usually L&D gets the blame.
Amy Brann thinks the blame lands in the wrong place. Her argument is about the way a company is set up: decision rights, meeting load and psychological safety. That set-up can cancel out good training. She calls it friction architecture. The skills are still there. People just cannot use them once they are back at work.
Adam Lacey sits down with Amy Brann, founder of Synaptic Potential, the people strategies consultancy she started after leaving medical school.
Amy has spent 20 years helping organisations around the world get better work out of their people. She writes books on the brain, advises chief executives, and recently took this argument to the McKinsey Global CFO conference.
Most L&D leaders have already felt the workplace undo their work. What they have lacked is the language to prove it. Amy builds that case from what a company actually does rather than what people say they feel, which is much harder for a leadership team to wave away.
She also explains why your brain reacts to a social threat much like a physical one. She covers what she would ask a chief executive before taking an L&D job, and the free calculator that puts a rough cost on the whole thing.
Amy's point is that training people and fixing the place they work in are not two things competing for the same budget. They are two halves of one job. Whatever L&D builds, the workplace decides how much of it survives.
What you'll learn:
Why the way a company is set up can cancel out training that worked
How to tell a skills problem apart from a workplace problem
Why a problem that comes back after you train different people is a system fault, not a people fault
Three things to check instead of asking people how they feel
How to quantify what the problem is costing, so the CFO engages with it Amy's three tips for anyone starting out in L&D, including why the biggest fixes are rarely training
🔗 Connect with Amy via LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amybrann/
📮 The Assembly Debrief
A short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSjW0
👋 Come and connect with us
We're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.
Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/
Brigid McCormack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brigidmccormack/
More from The Assembly & Assemble You
Learning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work, plus the AI Confidence Method, a workforce AI change programme that measures what your people really think about AI and then changes it. https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0xWSkk0
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