In my organization our entrepreneurial hay-day was between 8 and 12 years ago. In our solution community, except for the transient program management currently running the show, we collectively recognize that additional resources and opportunities lost to the grip of control have caused our progression to slow to the point of regression.

I see so many folks now that get so bogged down in the shiny wrapper and the splendor of options that they forget why they’re really there. To solve problems.

I think that’s part of what Simon references above. We have it so good ‘in the now’ that we often get lost in the luxury.

The perspective and stories brought by experience are too often have too little influence on current thought and practice.

Thanks for sharing.

“You should never ever under any circumstances give a client a hug,” said one.

“You’re just a jobsworth who hates clients,” said another.

I asked them who their clients were – one worked with young adults from Leaving Care services and the other with Category 1 sex-offenders. I think you can guess which one is which.

In all the discussion about the ‘future of workplace learning’, I wish there were little avatars indicating which ‘workplace’ the speaker was talking about.

I work in Business Development and Social Care (don’t ask how this happened, let’s just say my voluntary work got out of hand) and the methods I use in the two settings simply wouldn’t transfer. Methodology, like expertise, is domain specific.

L & D professionals who talk about the ‘bad old days’ are mostly, I hope, talking about historical resource constraints and the enterprise itself. Seems to me that the fact that I live in a state of unimagined luxury – econopalypse notwithstanding, I am richer than Queen Victoria by any sane metric – means we must have been doing some things right.

You’re right, sometimes you do choose to live with the givens. The past is one of those ‘givens’ and focusing on what was ‘bad’ about it is fun, on occasion – but should be no more than that.