A company I worked with spent a fortune on a new system. A year later I asked to see the usage data. Most people had logged in exactly once, on the day of the training.
They’d bought the capability. They just never absorbed it. That gap is what this show is about. One problem, one fix, every week.
Nobody had been lazy. The money hadn’t been short. The thing worked. And a year in, a fortune in tools sat in the building like gym equipment nobody’s touched since January.
That’s the pattern that bothered me more than any other. Not talent, not capital, and most of the time not even the strategy. An organisation can buy almost anything. It can absorb almost none of it.
This is the orientation episode. Who I am, what that word “ABSORB” actually means, and what you can expect this season. Then we get to work.
WHAT YOU’LL TAKE AWAY
The line: “Capability moves at the speed of learning, not the speed of money”.
The question, to take into a real meeting this week: “If this were true here, where would we see it?”
The deal, every episode after this one: one tell you can look for in your own organisation, one question you can ask your team, and one line sharp enough to repeat without me in the room. Give you none of those and I’ve wasted your commute.
Ep0 is the orientation, so it gives you the line and the question but not a tell. The tells start next week.
The written version of this episode is here. If you’d rather watch than listen, the episode is on YouTube.
Built to Absorb. One problem, one fix, every week.
