Insights
Ideas, questions and evidence-informed thinking about people, teams and organisations.
Simply Wright Insights explores some of the questions that sit behind organisational development, learning, leadership and organisational effectiveness.
The aim is not to offer quick answers but to look more carefully at what may be shaping performance, behaviour and change and what that might mean in practice.
Featured Insight
Are We Fixing the Problem - or Just Responding to What We Can See?
Organisations often invest in interventions that are well designed and well received - yet the underlying problem remains. This piece explores why better diagnosis matters before we decide what to do .... Organisations invest a lot of time, energy and money trying to improve teams, leadership, culture and performance. There is no shortage of activity. We run engagement surveys, leadership programmes, team-development sessions, coaching, culture work, away days and change interventions. Some are excellent. Some are strongly evidence-based. Some make a real difference. And sometimes, despite all that activity, the original problem is still there. The workshop was well received. The programme got great feedback. People valued the conversation. The team may even have left with a clear action plan. But a few months later, not much has really changed. That raises an uncomfortable question: Did the intervention fail — or did we misunderstand the problem it was trying to solve? That question has been occupying me more and more. Because organisations are under pressure to act. Leaders want progress. Teams want things to improve. Operational pressures continue while people are trying to understand what is going on. And there is often much more appetite for a solution than for uncertainty. So the presenting problem can easily become the diagnosis. “Communication is poor.” “Trust is low.” “The leadership team isn’t working.” “People aren’t challenging enough.” “The culture is the issue.” Those statements matter. They tell us something about how people are experiencing the organisation. But they do not necessarily tell us what is creating that experience. Poor communication might genuinely be about communication. Or it might be about inconsistent messages, unclear decisions, competing priorities, information getting stuck between levels, or an organisation changing faster than people can absorb. Low trust might be the thing people feel most strongly. But trust may have been damaged by something else — broken commitments, repeated changes of direction, hierarchy, unclear accountability or a history of speaking up without anything changing. The label tells us where to look. It does not always tell us why. And this is where I think Organisational Development and Organisational Effectiveness need to come together more deliberately. OD helps us understand people, relationships, leadership, culture and change. Organisational Effectiveness helps us understand the wider conditions that shape whether those people and teams can succeed - Structure. Decision-making. Processes. Governance. Resources. Information. Performance measures. Technology. And the external environment around the organisation. That does not mean OD should own all of those things. It shouldn’t. But OD does need to be able to see when those conditions are shaping behaviour and performance. Because sometimes the issue visible through people is being reinforced somewhere else in the system. An organisation can say collaboration matters while rewarding leaders mainly for the performance of their own areas. It can encourage empowerment while important decisions still need to travel through several layers of approval. It can talk about openness while people learn that challenge carries risk. It can ask teams to work differently while the surrounding system stays exactly the same. Which leads to two questions I keep coming back to: What is it about the environment that makes this behaviour understandable? And: If we changed the people but left the conditions unchanged, how much of the problem would remain? Those questions do not remove individual accountability - People still make choices. Leaders still shape culture. Teams still create norms. But they help us avoid locating every problem at the level where it becomes visible. They also change how we think about diagnostic tools. Measurement is useful. Surveys, interviews and assessments can reveal things we might otherwise miss. But a score is a signal, not an explanation. A low score on role clarity tells us something needs attention. It does not tell us whether roles are unclear, responsibilities overlap, decision rights are confused, or the organisation has changed faster than the structure around it. Measurement can tell us where to look. Diagnosis helps us understand what may be happening there. And sometimes that requires another very simple question: What else could explain this? That question matters because experience can work both for us and against us. Experienced practitioners are good at recognising patterns. But “this looks familiar” can quickly become “I know what this is”. Sometimes we are right. Sometimes we are not. Better diagnosis does not mean endless diagnosis. It does not mean months of interviews, workshops and analysis. The challenge is proportionality. How much understanding do we actually need before we can make a sound decision? Where is the evidence strong enough to act? And where does uncertainty matter because a different explanation would lead to a completely different response? That, for me, is the real opportunity. Not more diagnosis for the sake of it. Better diagnosis. More deliberate thinking between what we observe and what we decide to do. A stronger connection between Organisational Development and Organisational Effectiveness. And a willingness to ask, before we reach for the intervention: What are we actually trying to change — and why do we believe this action will change it?
When Manager Training Isn't the Answer.
We often notice the behaviour first: difficult conversations aren’t happening, accountability feels patchy, change isn’t landing, and sometimes training is exactly what’s needed. But sometimes I find myself wondering what sits underneath the behaviour — and whether we’re asking learning to solve something that isn’t really a learning problem. One of the things I’ve found myself thinking about quite a lot over the years is how quickly we can arrive at the conclusion that managers need training. And sometimes they do. There are plenty of occasions where a manager genuinely needs more confidence, knowledge or skill. I’ve spent a large part of my career designing and supporting development for exactly that reason. But I’ve also sat in conversations where the request for training has made me wonder what sits underneath it. Someone might say that managers are avoiding difficult conversations, that they aren’t managing performance well, or that they aren’t leading change effectively, and on the surface, those things can quite reasonably sound like development needs. What interests me is that the same behaviour can sometimes have very different explanations. A manager might avoid a difficult conversation because they don’t know how to have it, but they might also avoid it because previous experience has taught them that they won’t be supported if it becomes difficult. They might appear not to hold people to account because they lack confidence. or because expectations are unclear, priorities keep changing, or decisions are regularly overturned further up the organisation. The behaviour looks similar from the outside. What sits behind it may be completely different. And that’s the bit I keep coming back to. Not “does training work?” — because of course it can. More: what are we actually asking training to fix? I can understand why training becomes the answer so often. When something isn’t working, we tend to notice the behaviour first. Managers aren’t having conversations. People aren’t taking accountability. Change isn’t landing. Teams aren’t communicating well. Performance issues are being allowed to drift. These are things we can see, hear about or sometimes measure; and when the behaviour we want is different from the behaviour we’re seeing, development feels like a very logical response. I’ve been on both sides of those conversations. I’ve been the person being asked to create the programme, and I’ve also been the person trying to understand what the programme actually needs to achieve. Increasingly, I’ve found myself interested in the space between those two things because somewhere between “we need our managers to do this differently” and “let’s develop some training”, there is a question that can easily get lost: Why aren’t they doing it now? And I don’t mean that in a challenging or accusatory way. Sometimes the answer genuinely is that they don’t know how, but sometimes they do - they may even have been on the training before. That is usually the point where my curiosity kicks in. If people already know what good looks like, what else might be making it difficult for them to do it? What else might be going on? That question has taken me into some interesting conversations over the years because once you move beyond the assumption that the issue is simply one of skill, the picture can look quite different. I’ve worked with managers who were described as lacking confidence when, in reality, they were operating in environments where decisions were frequently second-guessed or reversed. I’ve seen managers criticised for not taking accountability when the boundaries of that accountability were anything but clear. I’ve seen people sent on development programmes to become more empowering leaders while working within systems that gave them very little freedom to make decisions. And I’ve seen managers encouraged to have more honest conversations with their teams in cultures where honesty did not always feel particularly safe. None of that means development has no place. In fact, sometimes development can help people navigate those conditions more effectively, but it does make me wonder about the limits of what we expect training to achieve. There is only so much confidence someone can build if the environment around them repeatedly undermines it. There is only so much accountability we can ask for if decision-making is unclear. And there is only so much behaviour change we can expect if the wider organisation keeps rewarding something different. That’s probably the point where my thinking has shifted most over time. I used to think more in terms of the gap between current behaviour and desired behaviour. Now I find myself thinking much more about the conditions surrounding that behaviour. Not just: What does this manager need to learn? But also: What are they experiencing that might be shaping how they behave? And once I start looking at it that way, the issue often becomes less about fixing the manager and more about understanding the whole picture. And perhaps that is the question I keep coming back to. Before we decide that managers need more training, are we sure that what we are seeing is really a learning need? Or are we sometimes looking at the visible behaviour and missing the conditions underneath it? I don’t think the answer is always obvious, but I do think it is worth asking the question.
AI and the Human Work of Leadership.
The more capable AI becomes, the more I find myself wondering what that means for the parts of leadership that are distinctly human. If technology can help us analyse, organise, prepare and make sense of complexity, perhaps the interesting question isn’t simply what AI can do for leaders — but what becomes even more important for leaders to do themselves. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what AI might change about leadership. There is, understandably, a lot of focus on what AI can do. It can help us analyse information, generate ideas, summarise complexity, draft communications, spot patterns and make some tasks significantly quicker; and I can already see how useful that can be. But the more I think about it, the more I find myself drawn to a slightly different question. If AI can take on more of the technical and information-heavy parts of work, what becomes more important for leaders to do themselves? Because leadership has never only been about having the answer. It is also about noticing how people are responding. Knowing when something hasn’t landed, even when nobody says so. Understanding when someone needs clarity, challenge, reassurance or simply space to think. Picking up on the conversation that isn’t happening. Recognising that two people can hear exactly the same message and experience it very differently. Those things are harder to automate and perhaps that is where the interesting shift begins. The more capable our technology becomes, the more visible the genuinely human parts of leadership may become too. The more I use AI, the more I notice that it can often help with the things around leadership. It can help structure a message, make sense of information, help us prepare for a difficult conversation, think through options or challenge our own assumptions. All of that can be incredibly useful but it still leaves the leader with the bit that matters most. The conversation itself. The judgement about timing. The decision about how much to say, how directly to say it and what the person in front of you might need in that moment. The ability to notice hesitation, frustration, uncertainty or disengagement. And the responsibility for what happens next. That makes me wonder whether AI will actually raise the bar for leadership rather than lower it. If some of the more process-heavy parts become easier, then perhaps there is less room to hide behind them, as the human part becomes more exposed. How well do we listen? How well do we build trust? How willing are we to have the difficult conversation? How comfortable are we with not having all the answers? How well do we understand the impact we have on other people? Those questions are not new but I suspect they may become harder to avoid. So, what do we still need to hold on to? I think this is where my excitement about AI is probably matched by a little caution. Not because I think leaders should avoid using it. Quite the opposite. I can already see enormous value in having something that can help us think, question, organise and make sense of complexity. What I’m more interested in is what happens if we start to outsource too much of the thinking that leadership actually requires. There is a difference between using AI to help you prepare for a conversation and using it to avoid thinking deeply about the person you are about to have that conversation with. There is a difference between asking it to challenge your thinking and asking it to make the decision for you. And there is probably a difference between using it to help find the right words and allowing those words to become a substitute for something genuine. That distinction feels important to me, because some of the most significant moments in leadership are not especially polished. They are the moments when someone admits they don’t know. When they change their mind. When they notice that a conversation has gone somewhere unexpected and stay with it rather than rushing back to the agenda. When they recognise that what they intended to communicate and what somebody actually experienced were not the same thing. AI may be able to help us prepare for those moments. I’m not sure it can have them for us, and perhaps that is the bit I find most interesting. As the tools around us become more sophisticated, I wonder whether effective leadership will depend less on demonstrating that we have all the answers — and more on how well we pay attention, make sense of what is happening around us, and connect with the people experiencing it. That doesn’t make AI less important. It may make the human part more important than ever.
Before You Fix Performance, Diagnose It.
I’ve always been slightly cautious about the word performance. Not because it isn’t important, but because it can make something quite complex sound deceptively simple. Someone isn’t delivering what we expected. A team is missing targets. Work is taking too long. Quality has slipped. Something needs to improve. Once we describe something as a performance issue, it can feel as though we already know what the problem is, but I’m not sure we always do. Sometimes poor performance really is about capability. Sometimes it’s about expectations that were never particularly clear in the first place. Sometimes people are working incredibly hard inside processes that make it almost impossible to succeed. Sometimes there are competing priorities, unclear decisions, duplicated work, poor information, or systems that create more friction than support. And sometimes what looks like an individual performance problem is actually something much bigger showing up through one person or one team. That’s probably why I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens before we decide how to improve performance. What are we actually seeing? And what might be creating it? The label 'underperformance' tells us that there is a gap. It doesn’t necessarily tell us why the gap exists, and I think that distinction matters. I think one of the interesting things about calling something a performance problem is that the label can start to narrow our thinking. Once we believe the issue sits with performance, the next steps can feel fairly obvious. More clarity. More monitoring. More accountability. More support. Perhaps a performance improvement plan. Sometimes those things are absolutely appropriate. but I’ve also seen situations where people are working incredibly hard and still not succeeding. Not because they don’t care. Not because they lack capability. Because the conditions around the work make good performance unnecessarily difficult. A process may be cumbersome. Information may arrive too late. Two teams may be working to different priorities. Decisions may take too long. Responsibilities may overlap. People may be constantly interrupted by urgent work that wasn’t part of the original plan. None of those things necessarily look like a “performance issue” when viewed individually, but together, they can have a very real impact on what people are able to deliver. That’s where I find myself becoming curious about the gap between effort and outcome. If someone is trying hard but still not achieving what is needed, what is getting in the way? If several capable people are struggling with the same thing, what might that tell us? If performance improves when one particular barrier is removed, what does that say about where the problem actually sat? Those questions feel much more useful to me than starting with an assumption that someone simply needs to do better. And perhaps that is the thing I keep coming back to: Before we try to fix performance, it helps to understand what is shaping it. The more I’ve worked with teams and organisations, the less comfortable I’ve become with treating performance as though it belongs entirely to the person doing the work. Of course individual contribution matters. People make choices. They bring different levels of skill, motivation, confidence and experience. There are times when someone genuinely isn’t meeting the expectations of their role and that needs to be addressed. But people are also working inside something. They are responding to the clarity they have, the resources available to them, the behaviour around them, the decisions being made, the systems they have to navigate and the signals they receive about what really matters. A combination of those things can either make good performance easier or make it surprisingly difficult. That doesn’t remove individual accountability. For me, it just makes the picture more complete, because if we only look at the person, we may miss the conditions that are influencing what they are able to do, and if we only look at the system, we may miss something that genuinely does sit with the individual. Perhaps the more useful question is not simply: “Who is responsible for this performance?” But: “What combination of things is producing the performance we are seeing?” That question feels very different to me. It shifts the focus away from finding somewhere to place the problem and towards understanding what might actually need to change. Sometimes the answer will still be capability, effort or individual accountability. Sometimes it won’t. But I’m increasingly convinced that the label underperformance should be the beginning of the enquiry, rather than the end of it.