Managers: The Secret Weapon for Developing Better Employees

The 70:20:10 learning model shows how to incorporate managers into the learning and developing process.

by Jay CrossInternet Time Lab

Sponsored by:

SummaryPeople learn their jobs by doing their jobs, and managers make or break the growth of the members of their team by frequent coaching and matching them to appropriate stretch assignments. Experience is the teacher, and managers shape those experiences.

Corporate management recently started paying attention to the “70-20-10” model that supplements formal learning with learning from experience and mentoring. The numbers are shorthand for how people typically learn their jobs in corporations: 70 percent from experience, 20 percent from exposure and 10 percent from education. That means successful workers learn three-to-four times as much from experience than they do from interaction with bosses, coaches and mentors. And they learn about twice as much from those conversations than they do in training sessions. This is what’s already happening in your company; the 70-20-10 model coaxes you to pay attention to experience and conversation.

Since the numbers are not precise and because 70-20-10 is a model, not a recipe, some organizations call it the 3E model (Experience: Exposure: Education). The terms are interchangeable.

This paper offers a vision of how management -- with the help of learning and development (L&D) professionals — can make learning from experience and conversation more effective, complementing formal learning to make the whole program more powerful. Replacing today’s haphazard approaches with systematic, enlightened management development can accelerate the development of future workers and get the entire organization working smarter. The potential is great.

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Convergence of work and learningThe world of business is undergoing a phase change. Work and learning have merged. Few people have noticed.

Earth-shattering forces snuck up on us when we weren’t looking, shifting major responsibilities from the institution to the individual.

Knowledge work has evolved into keeping up and taking advantage of connections. We learn on the job to do the job. In a time of increased business speed, learning is vital. To stay ahead and create more value, you have to learn faster, better, smarter.

The collaborative workplaceIn the old days, work was mechanical; workers learned the skills and knowledge to do their jobs from training sessions and then performed their job function. They did what they were told. Twenty-first century employees do complex, unpredictable work. Their primary job is dealing with situations that are not written in

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any job description. It’s up to them to figure out what to do. They have to learn on the fly. Often the best way to accomplish the goal is to collaborate with other people.

Social networks, both in-person and online, are democratizing the workplace, and workers have an increasing amount of say in what they learn and how they learn it. Millennials entering the workplace expect to be in charge of their own development. They are used to having information at their fingertips. In high school and college, they did their homework in collaboration with friends, and now they expect to work in collaboration with colleagues.

Traditionally, training departments were designed for mechanical work processes. Instructional designers created curriculum around tried-and-true best practices. Training identified knowledge gaps and delivered courses to close them. Today most of the

information workers need to know is unstructured and constantly changing. The Internet has switched our company hours to 24/7, and that often means making quick business decisions on a public stage. Hard-copy training material cannot train you to handle unique situations. Traditional training approaches are no longer enough. Workers and managers have to shoulder responsibility for their own learning.

Does this imply that training departments are obsolete? Quite the contrary. In the coming years, learning and development professionals will have more impact than ever before. Many of them will leave the human resources silo to tackle challenges in a new integrated way across the company. By taking their expertise in learning directly into the organization and working more closely with team leaders, learning and development staff will increase the impact of their learning programs.

Are training departments obsolete? Quite the contrary

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The advice that follows comes from practitioners, not academics. As chief learning officer at Thomson Reuters, Charles Jennings1 implemented the 70-20-10 model for the firm’s 55,000 employees. Heather Rutherford founded Blended, the Australia-based performance learning company that is the leading distributor of the Harvard ManageMentor program. Charles and Heather are the source of many of the suggestions and stories that follow. Let’s examine the 70-20-10 model, where it came from, how to take advantage of it and the opportunities it presents for learning and development professionals.

Origin of the 70-20-10 model

At its heart, 70-20-10 is all about re-thinking and re-aligning learning and development focus and effort. Morgan McCall, Robert Eichinger and Michael Lombardo originated the 70-20-10 framework at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina.

1 Disclosure: Charles is a senior director at my organization, the Internet Time Alliance.2 Career Architect Development Planner by Michael Lombardo and Robert EIchinger, Lominger Limited,1996

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Their 1996 book, The Career Architect2, stated that lessons learned by successful managers came roughly:

• 70 percent from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks and problem solving • 20 percent from feedback and working with and observing role models • 10 percent from courses and reading

As Charles Handy says, “Real learning is not what most of us grew up thinking it was.”

This simple formulation has gone viral. You will hear about it at every major training conference and read about it in all the learning journals.

When I recently shared the 70-20-10 model with a senior group of instructional designers and educational planners, they experienced an “ah-ha” moment. They realized that they’d been expending their energy in the formal realm, and that the formal accounts for only a small fraction of how people learn. You shouldn’t take this to mean that the 10 percent – formal learning – is going away. It’s essential. Rather, by starting to focus on experiential and collaborative learning too, you can improve your overall learning and development program.3

Without dealing with whether a given situation is 80:15:5 or 60:25:15, this group of instructional designers got the message that leadership development is overwhelmingly experiential. Experiential learning reinforces and boosts the results of formal learning. The 70 and the 20 increase the results from the traditional 10.

The simplicity of the 70-20-10 formulation makes it memorable. The message is that in business, we learn most by doing.

3 For more, watch this video: Demystifying 70-20-10 by Kelly Kajewski, Alliance Director at DeakinPrime

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70-20-10 is not without its critics. The model is based on observation. It is not a precise formulation like water boiling at 100° Celsius/212° Fahrenheit. Academics and purists complain that there’s no empirical evidence to back up 70-20-10. I counter that my colleagues and I have talked with thousands of managers about 70-20-10 and they agree that the proportions sound about right.

Is 70-20-10 good or bad news for trainers?

Imagine that a top executive from your company read an article about 70-20-10 in a Harvard Business Review blog and wondered whether your company should do something with it. Should you be worried or elated?

You have been investing most of your energy in formal learning. That’s what management asked you to do. It’s important; the company cannot live without it. You understand it upside down and backwards. You have probably implemented classes, workshops, online learning, a measurement system and learning events. You believe in these components.

On the other hand, the experiential and exposure parts of the spectrum are virgin territory for you. But the upside of investing in the support of experiential learning, assuming you are successful, is job enrichment, more responsibility, recognition from senior management and career advancement.

If you have the courage to tackle experiential learning, we have some advice on how to succeed. Let’s examine some of the things

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L&D professionals can do with managers to improve the 70, then the 20 and, finally, the 10.

The 70 percent: learning from experiencePeople learn by doing. We learn from experience and achieve mastery through practice.

Apprenticeship is a time-honored method of learning by experience, but I suspect that it didn’t go down like the history books tell us. Imagine being an aspiring sculptor in the studio of Michelangelo. Most of the time, the master is away painting the Sistine Chapel or executing a commission at some nobleman’s palazzo. In the meantime, junior apprentices learn from senior apprentices. Nothing new there: Most of the time, we learn more from our peers than from our superiors.

A manager makes sure the people she’s developing work and learn from a wide group of people. She rotates them through novel assignments. She assigns challenges and celebrates what people learn from their mistakes. She goes along with Picasso’s sentiment that “I do things I do not know how to do in order to learn how to do them.”

Experience is a difficult task master. We learn more from making a mistake than from getting it right the first time. That’s why wise managers throw team members into stretch assignments. It accelerates learning. Being forced out of one’s comfort zone is why some say that the only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience.

Stretch assignmentsExperiential learning is the gold standard. Matching the most appropriately challenging experience to the developmental stage of the worker is the most powerful lever in the manager’s toolbox.

Making the match requires knowledge of the work and the worker. The manager’s judgment in making the best match is what creates transformative learning experiences. Here’s a list of potential

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learning assignments that may lie just outside of the worker’s comfort zone.

Expand the scope of the work• Increase the worker’s responsibilities.• Increase span of control.• Increase decision-making authority.• Participate in a group to solve a real business problem.• Fill in for the manager or someone else.• Take on managerial responsibilities (e.g. budgeting,

interviewing).

Change and adversity• Work in a situation with rapidly changing circumstances.• Handle a crisis.• Work in a situation where something goes wrong or fails.• Work on new initiatives.• Build a new team from scratch.• Champion a new product or service.• Turn around a troubled project.

Enter challenging relationships• Work with people from other business units or functions.• Work with multiple people with contradictory and competing

view.• Work with customers or a customer service group .• Interact with senior management (e.g. meetings, presentations).• Lead a cross-functional team.

Persuade, teach and observe • Persuade senior managers to take a specific action.• Teach coworkers how to do a component of their jobs.• Volunteer as a mentor for new hires.• Reverse-mentor a senior person on social networking or

technology.• Introduce new productivity or organization techniques to the

team.• Shadow a coworker to see how he or she conducts his or her

work.• Work with a recognized expert.

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• Do a front line job for a while (e.g. answering calls in the call center, loading suitcases onto the airplane, flipping burgers)

Make work visible and discuss it with others• Narrate your work, share what you’re doing with colleagues.• Write a process-oriented blog.• Be active in social networks in the workplace and in the industry.• Curate information and share with others.

Charles Jennings reports that performance inevitably improves when managers ask their team members these three simple reflective questions:

1. What are your reflections on what you’ve been doing since we last met.

2. What would you do differently next time?3. What have you learned since we last met?

The 20 percent: learning through othersLearning is social. People learn with and through others.

Effective managers encourage their team members to buddy up on projects, to shadow others and to participate in professional social networks.

Conversations are the stem cells of learning. People learn more in an environment that encourages conversation, so make sure you’re fostering an environment where people talk to each other.

Conversations are the stem cells of learning

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Communities of practiceA Community of Practice (CoP) is a social network of people who identify with one another professionally (e.g. designers of logic chips) or have mutual interests (e.g. amateur photographers). Members of CoPs develop and share knowledge, values, recommendations and standards. What’s really great is that most CoPs are self-perpetuating.

Chefs and workers in the kitchen who aspire to be chefs are a community of practice. Newcomers learn the ropes from working alongside veterans. Respected senior chefs add to the knowledge base; that fuels the evolution of the chef community. All take pride in membership, as one would in a guild.

An effective community of practice is like a beehive. It organizes itself, buzzes with activity and produces honey for the markets. Silicon Valley is chock-full of communities of practice. Professionals there consider themselves programmers or chip designers or semiconductor engineers first and employees of HP or Intel or AMD second.

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Chefs are an example of a group of people who could form a community of practice.

Etienne Wenger4, who with Jean Lave coined the term community of practice in 1987, notes that there “is hardly a Fortune 500 company today that does not have somewhere an initiative to cultivate communities of practice.” And it is not just business but also non-governmental organizations and government that are cultivating communities. Nonetheless, Etienne sees the need to continue building learning capacity.

An effective internal community of practice requires:

• A common practice and shared enterprise• Active interaction and participation• Mutual interdependence• Overlapping histories, practices and understandings among

members• Respect for diverse perspectives and minority views5

The manager may get the ball rolling for a new community, nurture an existing one or ask an engaged and willing team member to kick-start the community. It’s vital to respect the autonomy of the community. The manager may free up people’s time to participate or make a meeting space available, but she should not try to shape the community’s agenda, for over-management stifles a community’s effectiveness.6

Coaching and action learningWhen Google sought to find out what makes managers successful, far and away the most important factor was being a

4 Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder, 20025 Coming to Terms with Communities of Practice, by Warren Barab and Fang del Valle, in the Handbook of Human Performance Technology (ISPI) 20066 Expanding Our Toolbox: Coaching Stakeholders on Performance Improvement Options by Mary Broad and Jim Maddock, 20077 Google’s Quest to build a better boss, New York Times, March 12, 2011

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good coach7. Google says a good coach “provides specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive.” A good coach “has regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employee’s specific strengths.” That’s great context for talking about personal growth.

Coaching provides8:

• Individual attention and personal support• Rapid resolution of conflicts• Improved communication among team members• Discovery, development and leveraging of strengths and

potential• Catalyst to support acceleration and maintenance of positive

change• Peek performance as individuals and teams • Set high-outcome goals and eliminate obstacles

Coaching is not always one on one. Managers employ what’s known as Action Learning to guide teams that explore real organizational challenges to resolve work issues and gain skills in reflective questioning and listening. The practice originated in the 1940s with English coal miners working on mining issues9. Mary Broad suggests what it takes for Action Learning to be successful:

• A pressing, complex organizational problem that’s clearly worth solving

• A coach who guides the group’s learning (not necessarily the team manager)

• Four-to-eight diverse individuals assigned to problem-solving teams

• A process that values reflective questioning and listening more than making statements.

• The group’s ability to take action to solve the problem

8 Google’s Project Oxygen (Eight Good Behaviors of managers) 9 Origins and Growth of Action Learning by Reg Revins, 1982

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MentoringThere’s a fine line between coaching and mentoring. Mentoring is the deliberate pairing of an experienced person (the mentor) with a less experienced one (the protégé or mentee). Mentees are not always direct reports of their mentors10. Mentoring takes the form of tutoring, counseling, modeling and giving feedback.

Facilitated mentoring — planned, guided and evaluated — is typically more successful than informal sessions. Effective mentoring requires11:

• Decision-maker support for identified needs, goals, opportunities and readiness

• Planning and design that are aligned with other performance interventions

• Criteria for matching mentors and mentees are agreed on by stakeholders

• Development plan in place

The 10: improving the outcomes of formal learningFormal learning includes courses, workshops, seminars, online learning and certification training. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations aren’t using online learning to its full potential, and the results at those organizations reflect that. Learning expert Robert Brinkerhoff figures only about 15 percent of formal training lessons change behavior.12 This is a reflection of both formal learning creation and of the lack of focus on experiential and exposure learning. If what we learn is not reinforced with reflection and application, the lessons never make it into long-term memory.

10 Expanding Our Toolbox: Coaching Stakeholders on Performance Improvement Options by Mary Broad and Jim Maddock11 Ibid12 The Success Case Method by Robert Brinkerhoff, 2003

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Only when all three learning components are implemented together will a learning and development department see superior results.

Formal learning is typically conducted by an instructor. So why do we address it in a paper on managers? Because managers can make or break the success of formal learning programs.

Research has found that the most important factor in translating formal learning into improved performance is the expectation set by managers before the training takes place13. Understanding the needs of the learners and following up after the event are also essential for formal learning success.

Broad’s research highlights the fact that the manager’s expectations of the team’s performance and aptitude should closely align with the objectives and design of any formal learning course. Otherwise the course will be of little or no use.

Create an environment that nurtures learningWorking through managers instead of through courses is a radical shift for learning and development.

Managers need to understand — and this is where senior management support is mandatory — that both L&D and the managers themselves are shifting responsibilities. Managers will be making 70-20-10 productive; L&D will be doing anything possible to increase performance and productivity.Blended, a leading learning organization in Australia, has implemented 70-20-10 in many organizations. Blended asked companies “Which of the following is the main barrier to a leader-led learning culture in your organization?”

13 Transfer of Training by Mary Broad and John Newstrom, Basic Books, 1992

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They responded:

1.Leaders do not have the time to perform a teaching/coaching role: 28 percent

2.Leaders lack teaching/coaching capabilities: 32 percent3.The organization lacks formal performance expectations for

leader-led learning: 28 percent

How would you rebut these responses? Like this:

1.This is not time away from the job. Rather, it’s ramping people up to do a better job. The time required for mentoring is offset by more delegation to subordinates and improvements in the way work is performed.

2.No one is asking managers to become teachers. Rather, the focus is on helping people perform better. This sort of coaching produces results.

3.If you don’t have performance expectations, this is a great time to set them. That’s one of the important areas in which we need senior executive support.

How to sell an executive on 70-20-10Changing the role of managers is a massive organizational change. You will not be successful without the support of a senior management sponsor who can open doors to at all levels and help your make your case.

You will need to become a champion for the new approach to developing talent in the organization. You must convince your sponsor that managers and supervisors are the linchpin to developing new talent. Without them, the company could find itself with nobody on the bench to take on future challenges. For your career, this lead role is high risk/high reward.

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Dan Pontefract, Head of Learning and Collaboration, TELUS, told us:

! Leadership is for all, but front-line and middle managers ! hold the key to the actual development of individual ! contributors. The more we pay attention to this direct ! relationship, and the more senior leaders do everything ! they can to ensure the tools, resources and opportunities ! are at the fingertips of these managers to assist people ! who are at the heart of the customer experience, the ! more likely we will be able to solve the rigidity of ! hierarchical management. Empower your people; ! let them help others learn how to learn. Let them be ! the sherpas of both employee and career development.

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Before 70:20:10 With 70:20:10

Build and maintain courses, workshops, and curricula

Manage work and learning ecosystems

Design and develop course materials for formal structured learning

Help design and develop course materials with help from managers.

Support all types of learning experiences in the workplace

Maintain a course-centric role with little coaching and ancillary activities

Maintain a performance-centric role, helping people work smarter

Offer a predominantly classroom-based with some structured eLearning

Offer a wide variety of learning, including experiential, social networks, guided by manager

Minimal manager involvement Extensive manager support

Education Education + Experience + Exposure

Role of Learning & Development Before and After Adopting the 70:20:10 Model

Dan Pontefract

While every situation is different, we’ve found that it’s best to introduce 70-20-10 in a small department and use the successes and learnings from that department to spread the model to other areas.

Your sponsor must help you convince managers of the importance of their role in growing people. Managers will need to make time to dedicate to developing their employees, but this doesn’t mean formal learning. You, the learning and development leader, must commit to helping managers get the know-how they need to take on a new, time-consuming — but ultimately fulfilling — responsibility.

Managers have to learn how to develop their people. It doesn’t always come naturally, and managers can get too busy to pay much attention to it.

Let them know you don’t expect them to train their people. Rather, they will set examples for their team; they will foster experiential learning by leading their team to tackle new challenges (the 70), by helping them reflect on the lessons of experience and by coaching them at every step (the 20), and by showing them how to get formal learning on the subject (the 10). This is how you make your learning program cohesive. This is a way for managers to delegate new assignments to strong team members and guide them to success, resulting in both a completed project and the development of the team. In the long run, the manager and the worker both perform more rewarding, higher-impact work and achieve more in less time.

The new management You have to study, pass tests and be certified to be a plumber or accounting clerk. Management has no such barriers to entry. Few managers know the process for developing talent. Your job is to show them how.

Instead of designing programs to teach workers skills, you’ll be convincing managers to apply their experience and knowledge to

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coax workers to learn for themselves. No more coddling. Think of the “teach a man to fish” saying.

The Learning and Development Roundtable of the Corporate Leadership Council pinpointed three management practices that significantly improve performance.

1. Setting clear expectations and explaining how performance will be measured.

2. Providing stretch experiences that help their team members learn and develop.

3. Taking time to reflect and help team members learn from experience.

These three practices have more impact on performance than the L&D department’s traditional activity of teaching knowledge and skills!

Managers who set clear objectives and expectations and explain how they measure performance are much more likely to succeed. Their teams outperform their peers by 20%. That’s an extra day every week to get the job done (and engage in deep learning). Managers should make explicit why they’re assigning particular projects, what they expect people to learn and what sort of debrief will occur after the assignment.

If you’re going to make this happen, start developing and polishing a compelling elevator pitch. Give it a shot right now. Pick a few things from the following list and mash them up with your organization’s needs. Get it down to three minutes and commit it to memory.

• Our company’s demand for capable, can-do talent is insatiable. • People learn to do complex jobs by doing them. Experience is

the best teacher. • Our front-line managers are the only people in a position to

select and assign the stretch assignments that will challenge our people to become true professionals. Unfortunately, we’ve

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provided them scant guidance in how to carry out these responsibilities.

• We can put a new management practices in place that focus on working smarter, making people productive sooner, accelerating talent development and integrating learning and work.

• Instead of maximizing efficiency and avoiding irregularities, managers must create organizations that are more agile and human.

• The new role of management is to facilitate the discovery of solutions, not to dictate them.

• Training used to focus on requests to fill gaps. Now we will focus on building the workforce capability to support future organizational strategy.

In a survey of thousands of people at 51 global organizations, only 14 percent of executives said they would recommend working with L&D to a colleague. More than 50 percent said they’d advise colleagues not to waste their time talking with L&D14. Training has a bad reputation — better to suggest entrusting development to respected managers until that reputation has been repaired. If you lead the effort and succeed, you can help change this reputation.

National Australia Bank offers a good example of how the 70-20-10 model works by analogy to learning to drive15. Remember, 70 percent of learning is experience, 20 percent is exposure and 10 percent is education.

Education (10 percent) is Driver’s Ed, studying the theory of driving, memorizing rules and regulations and passing a driving test.

Exposure (20 percent) is learning to drive through driving lessons and coaching from your instructor.

Experience (70 percent) is developing driving skills in different conditions and using different vehicles.

14 The Learning and Development Roundtable of the Corporate Leadership Council

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A word on motivating employeesPeople are naturally motivated to do things they find meaningful. The trick is that meaningful is subjective, so people have to find the work that they find personally meaningful — and often that changes over the course of a career. But when someone finds meaningful work, they take pride in accomplishment. They enjoy solving problems. They don’t shirk working for a cause they believe in.

Free workers to make their own decisions, give them a mission that’s greater than themselves and set high expectations. Establish targets and give workers the discretion to figure out how to reach them. Challenge them to learn how to be all they can be and get out of their way. Don’t take them by the hand unless they ask for it. Managers must challenge their people to be all they can be and give them the freedom to do it. Sell the managers on the 70-20-10 framework.

Conclusion

The 70-20-10 model depends on L&D teaming up with managers to improve learning across the company, but often managers do not appreciate how vitally important they are in growing their people. This is the absolute, must-do secret to success to improving learning and development. Frontline managers must take this as the very definition of manager: someone who develops others by challenging them with assignments that stretch them to the point of flow17. This takes a can-do manager who knows how coaching creates mental models and habits, how motivation activates a chain of high-performance activities and what success habits their team members need to adopt.

15 How do I learn to drive my car? by National Australia Bank, internal document

16 Leader Led Learning, Harnessing leaders for improved organisational performance, by Andrew Gerkens, Blended, 2012

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Charles Jennings says that the role that managers play is far more important than that of Learning and Development or HR. Your role is to help managers learn that:

• People learn from experience. • Managers shape the experience of the people on their team. • Experience coupled with reflection sticks lessons in memory. • Daily mid-course correction is much more powerful than after-

the-fact reviews.• Every project they assign is a potential learning experience for

their team members.

Business managers ask if they should invest 70 percent in experiential learning, 20 percent in coaching and 10 percent in the classroom. The answer is no. 70-20-10 is a framework to kick-start thinking about where to focus your efforts. Depending on where you’re starting from, your needs will vary.

Understanding the 70-20-10 framework helps managers reflect on their own experience and provides a starting point for discussion with other managers.

17 Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1991.

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AcknowledgementsThis paper draws heavily on the work of Charles Jennings, a leading thinker and practitioner in human development, change management, performance improvement and learning. Charles is senior director of the Internet Time Alliance. He has deep experience in both the business and learning practitioner sides of learning and performance. He knows what works in the world of strategic talent and effective performance and productivity approaches.

Charles is the Founder of The 70:20:10 Forum, a global membership portal helping professionals implement the 70:20:10 framework to maximize performance and productivity. The Forum offers a vast repository of practical information and connects members with a vibrant global community of fellow practitioners.  As part of its social responsibility, the Forum supports projects at Sreepur Village, a refuge in rural Bangladesh for destitute women as well as trafficked or abandoned children.

Another source of inspiration is Heather Rutherford, founder of Blended, an organizational learning solutions company. With a philosophy centered on the 70-20-10 framework, Blended supports clients in implementing a simple and powerful architecture supported by best-practice tools and resources to increase engagement, improve productivity, efficiency and performance.

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About the author

Jay Cross is an author, advocate and raconteur who writes about workplace learning, leadership, organizational change, innovation, technology and the future. His educational white papers, articles and research reports persuade people to take action.

Jay has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.

A champion of informal learning and systems thinking, Jay’s calling is to create happier, more productive workplaces. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He literally wrote the book on Informal Learning. He is currently researching the correlation of psychological well-being and performance on the job.

Jay works from the Internet Time Lab in Berkeley, California, high in the hills a dozen miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge and a mile and a half from UC Berkeley. People visit the Lab to spark innovation and think fresh thoughts.

He is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

jaycross.com

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About the Internet Time Alliance

The Internet Time Alliance helps clients understand and embrace complexity and adopt new ways of working and learning. We ask the tough questions and explore the underlying assumptions of how they do business. Then we work with them to develop strategies and plans for transformation and improvement.

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Image credits: Opening image credit: svanhorn / 123RF Stock Photo

Page 3 Barn raising from Wikimedia Commonshttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barn_raising_-_Leckie%27s_barn_completed_in_frame.jpg

Page 7 People talking By kiohttp://www.flickr.com/photos/kio/243865617/in/photostream/

Page 11 Chef Joe By Muffet http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/8010173164/in/photostream/

Page 15 Conversation in the rain By misko13http://www.flickr.com/photos/msk13/2396619590/in/photostream/

Page 18 Dan Pontefract via CLOMEDIA.cohttps://lh4.googleusercontent.com/---ZN83ORvu4/T9tPwcWru2I/AAAAAAAAg6k/o2vPpGhXtyA/s288/CO0712_cover_72dpi_RGB.jpg•

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