Transforming Business Agility: The Role of People Development

In the spirit of Stephen Dubner’s “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” this course was developed to answer a critical question facing modern organizations: Why does productivity decline even when we adopt all the right processes?.

You might think you know the answer—it’s about better tools, stricter plans, or more comprehensive documentation. But here’s something you might not know: the true catalyst for business agility isn’t a process; it’s a fundamental shift from people management to people development.

This course was designed to explore this surprising and demonstrably true insight. We challenge the long-held myths that leaders must be dominant and that management is about “hard” things like data and money, rather than “soft” issues like people and relationships. Instead, we reveal how to:

• Shift from a mindset of scarcity to one of co-creation, empowering a network of teams who deliver exceptional results because they are given clear responsibility and authority.
• Move beyond an ‘assembly line’ approach by creating human-centric organizations obsessed with their employees and customers, where people feel valued and do meaningful work.
• Cultivate a culture of generative learning, where the organization sees itself as connected to the world and understands how its own actions create its reality—and how it can change it.

Ultimately, this work is about unlearning the traditional leadership playbook of control and command and instead learning to enable outcomes, ask powerful questions, and build the self-awareness necessary to develop leadership in others. It’s a journey into discovering how to solve the engagement crisis by recognizing that people are the ultimate key to organizational survival and success.