I want to take that objection seriously, because it is the strongest one I hear and it contains a real point. This piece builds on an article I published on benjaminchaminade.com.au about the difference between employability and career sustainability. I drafted it with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work. Here I am arguing with myself, through the voice of the most sceptical person in that room.

The objection at full strength

The sceptic’s case has three parts, and each one sounds reasonable:

• Horizon: no employer controls a forty-year trajectory, so promising to protect one is either paternalism or a promise nobody can keep.
• Return: every hour and every dollar spent on someone’s long-term path may walk out the door with them to a competitor.
• Honesty: employability is a contract both sides understand. I train you, you stay current, and nobody pretends the relationship lasts for ever.

I will even hand the sceptic a fact from my own article. Australians are changing employers less often than they used to. Just over 1.0 million employed Australians, or 7.2%, changed employer or business in the year to February 2026, down from 7.7% the previous year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. If people are staying anyway, the return argument looks stronger still. Why invest in long careers when retention seems to be happening by itself?

What survives the objection

Start with the horizon. Career sustainability, as I define it, rests on a responsibility shared between the person, the employer and the wider system. The sceptic attacks a version where the employer carries the whole forty years, and I would attack that version too. The employer’s share is narrower: working conditions, workload and the recognition of transitions. Those are things the employer already controls this year, inside the three-year plan.

The return argument is weaker than it looks, for a reason the sceptic’s own dashboard hides. A policy built only on employability produces defensive learning. People train to stay visible on the market, the training completion rate looks excellent, and the organisation ends up with a workforce that is individually well certified and collectively no more capable. The skills were chosen against an external market, and the work the business needs came second. So the sceptic is already paying for development. The money simply buys certificates.

The ABS figure also cuts the other way once you read it closely. People who stay put while worrying about whether they could leave are in a worse position than people who move or people who feel secure. Retention driven by anxiety is fragile. Its costs (fatigue, mistrust and emotional turnover) arrive years later, and the dashboard files them under other headings. Robert Long, the ABS head of labour statistics, describes the decline as the continuation of a trend running since the 1970s, so nobody should expect it to pass on its own.

As for the price, the changes I suggest sit inside processes the sceptic already runs: the development conversation, the training report and the workforce plan. They need almost no extra budget.

Where the sceptic has a point

I owe the person in that room a few concessions.

First, employability stays necessary. It keeps people in the game, and an organisation owes it to them. When an HR team asks me which one to fund, my answer is both, in unequal measure and not in the same year.

Second, “almost no extra budget” still has a cost. Career sustainability takes leadership attention across several years, and a willingness to fund pauses and reconversions. A sceptic who calls that a real cost is right, and I would rather say so in the meeting than discover it in the second year.

Third, urgency. I argue that emergency framing pushes people into defensive learning, so the same caution applies to my own argument. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030, down from 44% in its 2023 edition. Jobs and Skills Australia found 29% of assessed occupations in shortage in its 2025 list, down from 33% in 2024 and 36% in 2023. The pressure is easing, which means career sustainability has to win on its merits without borrowing a crisis.

Fourth, my own evidence. I claim that mastered drudgery (work somebody performs well and dislikes doing) predicts resignations better than engagement scores. That claim comes from my Talentstorming work, and my article cites no study for it. I trust it, and a sceptic is entitled to test it on their own teams before rebuilding a policy around it.

So the sceptic can keep the three-year plan. I would only ask for one question in the next round of development conversations: what would you still want to be doing in fifteen years, and what in your current role makes that less likely? Hearing the answer costs nothing. Ignoring it has a price, and that price usually arrives as a resignation nobody saw coming.

Read the full article in English: https://benjaminchaminade.com.au/employability-career-sustainability/

Lire l’article en français : https://benjaminchaminade.com/employabilite-vs-durabilite/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

This piece builds on an article I published in French on glukoze.com about reading managerial culture through ordinary meetings. I drafted it with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work. The original article makes the case. Here I want to deal with the practical question that comes straight after it (the one directors usually ask before I have finished my coffee).

Pick the dullest meetings in the diary

Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker, two American researchers who study school culture, separate culture from climate. For them, culture is the personality of a group and climate is its mood in a given situation. Climate shifts in a few days, and culture takes several years. That distinction gives you your first practical rule: if you want to see the personality, stay away from the moments when the team is performing.

So skip the offsite, the seminar and the crisis meeting. Choose three routine meetings instead:

• the weekly team check-in,
• a project review,
• and the operational committee where nothing dramatic is on the agenda.

Boring is the whole point. In routine meetings nobody thinks to show their best side, so the unwritten rules come out on their own.

Who watches, and what they write down

Here is the part most managers resist. If you observe your own team, you will miss the rules you have practised for years, because to you they look like common sense. Ask someone from outside the team to observe at least one of the three meetings. An outsider notices what the regulars find normal, which is the whole reason for the exercise.

Give the observer four things to note, and nothing else:

• Speaking: who talks first, who stays silent and who interrupts.
• Objections: how the group receives a disagreement, and what happens afterwards to the person who raised it.
• Decisions: what happens when a decision displeases people, in the room and later in the corridor.
• Errors: what the team does with a failure, whether it analyses it, goes silent or looks for someone to blame.

You need no questionnaire and no interviews. Across three meetings, the pattern that returns when tension rises is your dominant culture.

Gruenert and Whitaker describe six group cultures: toxic, fragmented, balkanised, contrived collegiality, comfortable and collaborative. Your notes will usually lean towards one of them. Sarcasm that nobody answers points to a toxic culture. A round table where everyone reports and nobody waits for anyone else’s view looks fragmented. Information held back between departments, with decisions negotiated one to one with each clan, looks balkanised. And a “collaborative” meeting where the decision was taken before anyone sat down is what the education researcher Andy Hargreaves called contrived collegiality, back in 1994.

The one I would watch hardest is the comfortable culture. Every climate indicator stays green, the team congratulates itself, the survey improves and nothing gets better.

Change one gesture, then hold it

This is where the four signals earn their keep. A score gives you a level of satisfaction and leaves you alone with the “so what now?” question. A signal points at a behaviour, and a manager can change a behaviour by Tuesday.

So choose one gesture per team, tied to the signal that worried you most. If objections die in the room, the gesture might be the manager asking for the strongest disagreement before any decision closes. If errors set off a hunt for a culprit, the gesture might be opening the next review with what the team learned. One gesture is enough. A manager trained in active listening who goes back to a team whose unwritten rules have not moved will find little room for the new skill, so the gesture has to live inside the real meetings.

Gruenert and Whitaker make a point I like a lot: changing a culture takes time, but starting takes two minutes. Their own illustration is almost comic. Bringing pastries on a Monday improves the climate of that day, and turning it into a regular practice begins to touch the culture. Your chosen gesture follows the same logic. Its value comes from repetition, far more than from the training session where somebody first heard about it.

Now, where this breaks. Observing meetings covers few teams at a time, so you cannot read a whole organisation this way. Keep your engagement barometer, read it as a climate indicator, and use it to decide which teams to observe first. Then accept one uncomfortable fact from the same research: leaders weigh on a group’s culture more than anyone else. If the executive committee never puts its own meetings under the same four signals, every team below it will notice (and the gesture you asked for will look like homework handed down from people who skipped theirs).

Read the original article (in French): Culture managériale : la réponse se trouve dans vos réunions https://glukoze.com/culture-manageriale/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

I think that objection deserves a proper hearing, because it is the one most leaders hold and few say aloud. This piece builds on an article I published in French on benjaminchaminade.com about what design thinking and collective intelligence really demand of a leader; I drafted it with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work. My plan is simple: take her objection at full strength, then see which parts of my argument survive it and which parts need sanding down.

Where she is right

She is right on three counts, and I would rather concede them early.

First, accountability does sit with her. Nothing in design thinking or collective intelligence moves the consequences of a bad decision onto the participants. When the prototype fails in the market, the workshop group goes back to its day jobs and the chief executive explains the numbers.

Second, the prerequisites I describe are expensive. Accepting that observation may redefine the problem means accepting to fund a solution to a problem different from the one you identified. Creative leadership, as I define it, gets tested over four quarters of successive budget decisions. That is a real line in a real budget, and a two-day workshop is a much cheaper purchase.

Third, she is entitled to keep the decision. I said so in the original article and I stand by it: a refusal that the leader states openly is perfectly manageable, and a negative answer to the prerequisite question disqualifies nobody. It simply points towards a different format of work.

So far, her objection wins. The trouble starts with what she does next.

Where the objection stops working

Her conclusion is that the method is the problem. My reading is that her objection argues for a different method, or for no workshop at all, and leaves the case for honesty about the method fully intact.

Look at the three regimes a group session can run under. The group decides, the group informs a decision that stays with the leader, or the group validates a decision already taken. All three are legitimate, and a team copes perfectly well with the third one when somebody announces it at the start. What a team never forgives is a session sold as the first regime that turns out, at the final presentation, to have been the third.

That is the real cost my sceptical chief executive is missing. Her accountability argument justifies keeping the decision. It does not justify keeping the decision while running a ritual that implies the opposite. The second behaviour produces cynicism, and cynicism shows up in the next session as cautious ideas that cost nothing if they are rejected.

The same logic applies to design thinking. If she will not accept a redefined problem, the immersion phase becomes decoration. The team notices quickly, and it treats every later immersion as a box to tick. Her refusal costs nothing when she states it before launch. It costs a great deal when the team discovers it at the end.

And the third prerequisite, the budget line? Her objection is strongest there, and I accept that many organisations cannot hold it. My answer is that a string of workshops without that line produces a short, limited effect, because the energy of the seminar drops the moment people return to ordinary budget decisions and find nothing changed. If she will not fund the line, she should save the workshop budget too.

What I would nuance in my own argument

Her pushback does improve the idea. I would reword my original point in two ways.

My first rewording concerns the prerequisites, which work better as a declaration than as a sacrifice. A leader does not have to give up control to use these methods well. She has to say, in one sentence and before the session, how much control she is keeping. That is a far smaller ask, and an accountable executive can make it without flinching.

My second rewording concerns cancellation, which is a perfectly respectable result. When the framing work shows that the leader cannot hold a prerequisite, the workshop can give way to a decision taken openly in committee. In my experience that outcome rarely disappoints anyone, because it saves collective time and spares the team a letdown.

Two questions remain whatever she decides. Who decides once the ideas are on the table, and what happens to the people whose ideas were not kept? Answering both before the session takes about ten minutes. The fix fits in two commitments: name the body that will decide, with its criteria, and set the date on which someone comes back to the participants with the outcome.

My sceptical chief executive can keep every ounce of her authority and still follow that advice. In fact she is better placed than anyone to follow it, since she is the one who knows who will really decide. What the method asks of her is to tell the room the truth in advance, and that prerequisite is much cheaper than the one she was objecting to.

Read the original article (in French): Ce que le design thinking exige vraiment du dirigeant https://benjaminchaminade.com/leadership-creatif-design-thinking/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

This piece builds on an article I published on benjaminchaminade.com.au about the six pillars of futureproofing. I drafted it with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work. My aim here is the question a convinced reader asks next: what do I change in my own team, starting this week, when the big decisions sit two floors above me?

The pillar you already own

Most of the six pillars belong to somebody senior. The business model, the technology stack and the climate disclosure timetable live in the boardroom, and a team leader cannot move them alone. Culture and people are different. Culture is what a group tolerates, values and repeats without noticing, and every manager shapes it every single day, whether they intend to or not.

That fact brings good news and bad news. The good news is that culture, the pillar organisations underestimate most consistently, carries no licence fee, no vendor and no implementation partner. The bad news follows from the same fact: nobody will sell it to you, and nobody will hand you a programme for it. You build it through your own behaviour in front of an audience, and that is the expensive part.

Here are the four moves I would make in the first month:

• Run the scoring exercise at team scale. Give each person the six key questions and ask them to score each one from one to five, alone, before anyone speaks. Then look for the widest disagreement instead of the lowest average, because disagreement marks the pillar nobody understands.
• Give curiosity a date in the calendar. Atlassian’s ShipIt works because it comes back every quarter. A recurring commitment survives a busy period, and an open invitation to “innovate whenever you have time” dies in the first busy week.
• Report a failure first. If you want people to say “I don’t know” or “that went wrong”, the person with the most status in the room has to go first, and preferably about something real.
• Give away one decision for good. Distributed leadership starts small. Pick one decision that currently queues behind your approval and hand it to the team permanently.

None of these needs a budget. All of them need you to look slightly less in control than you did last week, which is exactly why most managers skip them.

Three behaviours make a better scoreboard than a dashboard

In the original article I suggested watching behaviour before metrics. The early signals I named were a failure reported before anyone asks, a decision made without approval and a customer request that changes a roadmap. Financial indicators move later, and they move because those behaviours moved first.

For a team leader, those three signals can be the entire scoreboard for a quarter. Keep a plain note each time one of them happens. At the end of the quarter, count the notes. If the count is zero, you have your culture diagnosis, and it cost you a notebook.

The third signal deserves a warning. A customer request that changes the plan means letting someone outside the team decide part of what you build next. Most organisations find that uncomfortable at company level, and it feels just as uncomfortable in a team of eight. It is also the clearest sign that the team listens to its users all year long, and a survey once a year will never give you that signal.

Where it breaks

I see three places where team-level futureproofing usually stalls.

The first is the gap between the request and the constraint. In my own work, one large group asked me for an innovation culture and needed time, and a room of chief financial officers asked for a framework for uncertainty and needed language. Your team will ask for training, tools or headcount. Before you fight for any of them, check whether the real constraint is something more boring, such as two free hours a month that nobody protects.

The second is the ceiling above you. If your executive team still treats the six pillars as six portfolios, your work will hit a decision that belongs to another executive, and it will stop there. Your job at that point is to send the evidence upwards. The scoring disagreement in your team is evidence, and so is the list of things the weakest pillar currently blocks.

The third is enthusiasm. Attempting all six pillars at once produces six half-finished programmes, in a team as much as in a company. Choose one pillar, one owner and one visible signal, then review it after one quarter before you add anything.

Futureproofing rewards the organisations that start before the pressure arrives. The same holds for teams, and teams have one advantage over boards: a team leader does not need a year of alignment meetings to begin. A scoring sheet, a recurring date and the nerve to go first will do for Monday.

Read the original article: Six pillars that decide if you last https://benjaminchaminade.com.au/futureproofing-six-pillars/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

I want to take that objection seriously, because it is the strongest one I hear. This piece builds on an article published on glukoze.com about passion in HR evaluation grids; I drafted it with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work. The question here is simple: what survives of the sceptic’s case, and what does not?

What the sceptic gets right

Quite a lot, to be fair. Removing affective criteria has a real cost, and I prefer to say so upfront. You lose the criteria that let you reward attitude and cultural fit. You lose the latitude that helped you separate two people whose actions look comparable. You also take on an annual revision job that nobody was funding before.

The sceptic is also right that energy, initiative and commitment exist. Nobody serious claims a team runs just as well on indifference. So if the objection were “these qualities matter”, I would simply agree and go home early.

The objection is narrower than that, though. It says these qualities belong on a scoring grid in their current form, written as a single word with no definition. That is where it starts to crack.

Where the objection breaks

A competence can be described by an act, a context and an expected result, so it can be checked. A feeling is described by how intensely someone feels it, so it can only be declared. Once a feeling lands on an appraisal form, it stops being private and becomes a behaviour to perform in front of the evaluator. The employee learns to display enthusiasm, and the campaign ends up rewarding the quality of the display.

The sceptic assumes they can see the difference between real energy and a good show. I have watched that assumption fall apart. In one Glukoze engagement with the management line of a services company, the HR team asked us to work on evaluator posture because scores looked too similar from one manager to the next. We read the form with the group line by line and asked each manager what they looked at to tick each box. The disagreement surfaced on an “involvement” criterion that everyone validated without difficulty. Some managers meant availability in the evening, others meant speaking up in meetings, and others meant how fast people answered messages. None of them knew they disagreed with their colleagues, because the form had never asked them to make their evidence explicit.

That story answers the sceptic better than any argument I could make. Their “ability to tell people apart” was in fact several private rules that nobody had compared. Each manager was confident, and each was measuring something different.

There is a fairness problem too. The person who demonstrates best is not always the person who contributes most. Our work with management teams shows that a display of enthusiasm often compensates for an average result, and a manager who rewards the display ends up paying for a performance at the price of a contribution. (Theatre is a fine profession. It just belongs somewhere other than the appraisal form.)

In France there is also a legal angle. Labour law requires evaluation methods to be relevant to their purpose and disclosed to employees before use, and a criterion that cannot say what it measures fits that requirement badly.

What I would concede, and what I would ask in return

Here is the nuance the sceptic deserves. The sorting exercise never forces you to throw a quality away. For every criterion without written evidence, you choose among three outcomes: rewrite it as an observable act, remove it from the form, or keep it deliberately outside the scoring. If you truly value energy, the third option keeps the conversation alive without turning it into a grade.

The first option often rescues what managers thought they would lose. Written as a character trait, “initiative” cannot be assessed. Written as the number of improvement proposals brought to the team and followed by a decision within the year, it becomes a defensible line that produces evidence. The same move works for cooperation, counted as contributions to work led by another team and confirmed by the person leading it.

A sharper sceptic will say people can game a count as well as a smile. That is true, and I accept it. The difference lies in what a dispute is about. A criterion with written evidence gets argued on the evidence, so the disagreement concerns a fact anyone can check. A criterion without evidence gets argued on the supposed sincerity of the employee, which nobody can check.

So my offer to the sceptical manager is this: keep caring about energy and commitment, and stop scoring them as a word. Write down what you would need to show to tick the box without any possible discussion. If you cannot write that sentence, the criterion was measuring your impression, and your colleagues were measuring theirs.

Read the original article (in French): La passion n’a pas sa place dans vos grilles RH https://glukoze.com/la-passion-na-pas-sa-place-dans-vos-grilles-rh/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

This piece builds on an article I published on benjaminchaminade.com, the last of a ten-part series on what regenerative agriculture can teach management. I drafted it with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work. Here I want to deal with the question a convinced reader asks next: what do I change first, and where will it break?

Start with the people you promoted

My answer is deliberately unglamorous. Pull the list of everyone promoted in your organisation over the last three years. (Yes, the whole list. HR has it somewhere, probably in a file nobody has opened since the last review cycle.) Go through it name by name and ask one thing: is anyone on this list known for passing knowledge on or for rebuilding a team?

If the answer is nobody, you have found your bottleneck. Your indicators can wait, because your evaluation system is what blocks you. Promotions tell the truth about what an organisation values, far more faithfully than its KPIs and its speeches put together. They also shape who will run the place next. A promotion list that only rewards people who optimise the counters means the organisation is selecting exactly the behaviours that weaken it, and I consider that selection the real cost of raw productivity.

Do a second check the same afternoon. Look at your annual objectives and ask whether they assume, without saying so, that people will work beyond a sustainable load. If hitting budget structurally requires an unbearable workload, no HR policy will make up for that contradiction.

Three moves for the coming quarter

• Add one question to every year-end review. Ask what is left in the organisation that this person put there. The question separates two profiles that output per head confuses. The first produces a lot and takes everything with them when they leave. The second produces slightly less and leaves behind skills, routines and relationships that others now carry.
• Rewrite the manager criteria. Keep operational results, and add how far team members actually developed, what was passed on, whether the team climate held and what the manager contributed to other teams. A manager judged only on raw team output has every reason to keep up permanent pressure, hoard the best people and refuse to lend anyone. People optimise whatever is measured, so a change in criteria changes behaviour.
• Use four questions in your next hiring round. What knowledge have you passed on in previous roles, which long professional relationships have you built, how do you judge a team’s fertility beyond its results, and what stays behind when you leave?

None of these requires a new software licence. They do require you to accept that the most productive person on your spreadsheet might have a negative net contribution, since a high performer who exhausts the team around them can cost the collective more than they bring.

Where it breaks

I would rather warn you now than let you find out halfway through.

The easiest path breaks first. Adding contribution indicators takes about a quarter, and it is also the easiest path to ignore. You end up with one more dashboard, tracked faithfully and connected to no decision. If promotion criteria stay untouched, nobody changes how they behave.

Rewriting evaluations breaks somewhere else. It takes one to two years, and it can trigger open conflict with managers who were promoted under the old rules. (They have a point, too: they played the game you designed.) Expect that conversation and prepare for it.

Then the executive committee will ask for a single score. Resist it. A single number would repeat the exact flaw you are trying to fix, because it would choose what it counts and make the rest disappear. A map across several dimensions forces people to discuss trade-offs instead of hiding them. Holding that map without collapsing it into one figure is a large part of the job for any HR director who wants this to stick.

The deepest break concerns strategy. Suppose your objectives can only be met by pushing people above the ceiling of the managerial doughnut, my adaptation of economist Kate Raworth’s doughnut, with a floor of needs the organisation guarantees and a ceiling of demands it must not exceed. In that case the strategy has to adjust, and the doughnut stays where it is. That path takes two to three years and needs the agreement of the CEO and the shareholders. You will not win it on Monday. You can start building the case on Monday, though, and the promotion list makes a good first exhibit.

Farmers went through a similar switch when Gabe Brown argued that a farm should be judged on profit per hectare rather than yield per hectare. The HR equivalent is to judge productivity by what remains after each person has passed through, instead of by what was extracted from them during the period. Monday’s version of that switch fits on one page: a list of names and an honest question.

Read the original article (in French): Contribution nette positive : du rendement par collaborateur à la fertilité collective https://benjaminchaminade.com/fertilite-collective/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

That objection deserves better than a slogan, so this piece takes it seriously: what it gets right, where it breaks and what I would concede. It builds on a longer guide to innovation management I published on benjaminchaminade.com.au; I drafted this version with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work.

The sceptic has the data on their side (partly)

Start with the numbers, because the sceptic will. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 46% of Australian businesses were innovation-active over the two years to 30 June 2023. Among businesses reporting barriers, lack of access to additional funds came first at 19%. A shortage of skilled people in the market followed at 16%, then a shortage of skilled people inside the business at 14% and development or implementation cost at 13%. Every barrier on that list concerns resources. Culture does not appear once.

The sceptic is also right about time. In the comparison table in my guide, ISO 56001 certification takes six to eighteen months depending on the documentation you already have, and an innovation programme takes one quarter to launch. Culture work needs one to two quarters before behaviour shifts, and the first signal usually shows up in meetings. That is slower to demonstrate and harder to put on a slide. (Good luck getting “people now dare to contradict the boss” into a board pack.)

And the sceptic is right that culture alone fails. An organisation with a bold culture and no framework watches its ideas scatter, its projects drag on and its resources evaporate. I say so in the guide, and I mean it.

Where the objection breaks

Look at what the ABS list measures. It records what businesses say about themselves. A company where the last bold proposal was corrected in front of everyone will not tick a box called “we punish ideas”. It will tick “lack of funds”, because that is a barrier it can name without embarrassment. This is precisely why the culture conversation keeps losing to a funding submission.

Then look at the frameworks. ISO 56002 described a complete innovation management system in 2019, and ISO 56001 made the requirements certifiable in 2024. They are public, documented and auditable. If a framework were enough, innovation would be spread evenly across every organisation that adopted one, and it plainly is not.

Kodak had no funding problem and no skills problem. It invented the digital photo sensor in the 1970s and held the patents, the laboratories and some of the best imaging engineers in the world. What it lacked was a culture able to accept that digital would cannibalise its profitable film business. Blockbuster, which filed for bankruptcy in 2010, had the means as well. Netflix was ahead because it treated its own current model as provisional, and none of its moves relied on technology Blockbuster could not reach.

The field case in my guide is the hardest one for the sceptic, because it shows their preferred option working exactly as designed. A manufacturing business set up an ideas platform, a monthly committee, a test budget and posters in the workshops. A few months later, the ideas coming through were about chairs, the coffee machine and paint. The real subjects existed (a machine setting that forced two pointless checks, a tracking system duplicated by a paper sheet), and they came up as soon as anyone talked with the teams. They never reached the platform because proposing one meant formalising it, costing it, defending it in committee and often inheriting the project with no time allocated. The budget was there. The reason to be brave was missing.

What I would concede

Three things, and none of them is trivial.

• Sequence matters more than selection. The sceptic’s options have their place, which comes later: culture work first, a programme second as the channel for energy that already exists, and certification third once behaviour and pipeline both hold. In regulated sectors, tender-driven markets or groups that need a common language across subsidiaries, certification earns its keep.
• Culture needs numbers too. Counting ideas submitted and workshops held measures agitation. Better indicators are the share of revenue from products or services less than three years old, the proportion of floor-level ideas that reach completion and the delay between an idea appearing and its first real test. They move slowly and resist decoration, which is exactly what a sceptic should want.
• Distrust anything labelled culture that produces only visibility. A head of innovation, a glass-walled lab and hackathons run for the photograph breed cynicism, and the next initiative then starts below zero.

So my answer to the sceptic ends with a question rather than a slide. In your organisation, was the last person who proposed something risky thanked or punished? Whatever the answer, it tells you whether your next funding round will buy innovation or a very well run pipeline for coffee-machine suggestions.

Read the full article in English: https://benjaminchaminade.com.au/innovation-management/

Lire l’article en français : https://benjaminchaminade.com/le-guide-du-management-de-linnovation/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

Say you are convinced. This piece starts there and takes the next question, the one a manager asks on a Monday morning with a coffee and a full inbox: what do I actually do this week, and where will it break? (It builds on that article, which I published in French on glukoze.com; I drafted this version with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work.)

Monday: one job family, three columns and one sentence

The temptation is to launch a programme. Resist it. The measure needs three columns, and your HR system already holds two of them:

• the job family, defined by the work people actually produce rather than by grade or level of responsibility;
• the arrival date, taken from the contract;
• and the date of the first work produced without supervision, confirmed by the direct manager.

The third column is where most teams stumble, and the obstacle sits outside the data. Before anyone fills it in, someone has to write one sentence saying what counts as autonomous production. Without that sentence, every manager applies a private threshold and the comparison between families is worth very little. (I find this the most humbling step, because plenty of managers realise they have never said it out loud.)

Run it on the arrivals of the last twelve months. You get a first curve without waiting for the next hire, and you get one number per job family that speaks the language of your executive team. A median of ninety days on a family that hires forty people a year is a cost you can put on the same slide as the cost of recruitment.

Do this before you touch your onboarding programme. The measure tells you where to put the effort, and it stops you spending money on roles whose delay was already short.

Tuesday to Friday: write what the festival writes

Once a family shows a long delay, look at the four artefacts that organisations with a variable headcount produce because they have no alternative:

• a written scope of responsibility, saying what the person decides alone and what they escalate;
• a description of the expected task in terms of an observable result rather than a required skill;
• a single named contact, reachable for the whole assignment;
• and a criterion of good completion, known before the person starts.

Start with the fourth. In the field case behind the original article, a services company had just rebuilt its onboarding and was happy with its satisfaction scores, yet first-year departures kept coming. Across forty-eight arrivals, two job families on the same classification level showed median delays of three weeks and five months. Managers in the slow family all described the same gap: nobody had written down what a correctly handled file looked like, so every newcomer rebuilt that criterion by trial and error, pulling in a senior colleague at each doubt.

Writing that criterion takes about an hour per role with the manager concerned. A rebuilt onboarding programme takes months and a content budget. I know which one I would schedule for Thursday afternoon.

Where it breaks

Three places, in my reading of the argument.

Under pressure. The direct manager decides when a newcomer gets unsupervised work. Handing a file over costs review time and a risk of rework today, while holding it back costs a week of delay that no monthly dashboard shows. So the delay grows precisely when you most need extra capacity. Each manager’s choice is reasonable and the sum of those choices is expensive. The only counterweight I know is to make the deferred cost visible in your reviews.

In the pay grid. The framework underneath all this is what Glukoze calls the fraction confiable, roughly the trustable fraction: the share of an organisation’s work that someone on their first day can execute. Ranking roles that way draws a different map from your classification, which complicates pay policy and social dialogue. The sensible move is to run it alongside your existing classifications, and to use it only to steer ramp-up.

In contracts shorter than the ramp-up. If a role’s delay is longer than the average contract on that role, the role never produces autonomous work, however good the people you hire. In France this is no edge case: Insee reports that 87.7% of fixed-term and temp contracts that ended lasted thirty-one days or less. For those roles, writing the work comes first, because mentoring and onboarding both need time those people never get.

Your onboarding programme may still be excellent. It answers a different need (belonging, the unwritten rules and a first internal network), and the delay measure shows you which of the two needs you are paying to meet. Everything that has never been written requires the presence of the person who knows. Monday is a good day to find out how much of your organisation that describes.

Read the original article (in French): De 33 salariés à 700 en un mois, et vous ? https://glukoze.com/delai-integration-operationnelle-fraction-confiable/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

That objection deserves a proper hearing, so this piece starts there. It builds on an article I published in French on benjaminchaminade.com about attention as the energy flowing through a company; I drafted this English version with AI assistance, and it reflects my own ideas and work. The original borrows from regenerative agriculture. The same rainfall either runs off a field or soaks into it, and the soil’s capacity to absorb decides the outcome far more than the amount of rain. My claim is that organisations keep pumping attention out of their teams and never ask how much of it soaks in.

What the sceptic gets right

The objection holds more truth than consultants like to admit. Every source of drain I listed in the original article comes with a legitimate defence. Each new tool answered a real problem when it arrived. Each mandatory module, from compliance to data protection, is reasonable on its own. The person copied on an email sometimes did need to know.

The sceptic is also right about the bill. Protecting attention costs apparent responsiveness, it costs visibility for the people who communicate a lot, and it costs the comfort of reaching anyone at any moment. Those three losses are immediate, and the leaders themselves feel them first. I won’t pretend otherwise, because a consultant who hides the bill loses the room the first time a client waits until Tuesday.

There is also a trap the sceptic would love to point out. If you cut half the recurring meetings and decide nothing about channels, the load moves straight into messaging. The organisation believes it fixed the problem while the same drain now arrives by notification.

Where the objection breaks

The objection assumes that the attention a company draws turns into responsiveness. I would test that assumption with numbers rather than opinions.

Reconstruct a typical week on a sample of roles and split the hours between meetings, messages, dashboards, mandatory training and the actual job. The share left for the core job is what I call the available attention rate. In my framework, a regenerative organisation aims for around seventy per cent, and a conventional one often falls below forty. If your sample shows forty, the sceptic is defending a speed the organisation does not have. People are busy watching six channels in parallel, and busy makes a poor proxy for responsive.

The second weakness is the cost nobody sees, because no dashboard shows it. In the original article I listed six effects of unmanaged attention: chronic exhaustion, the loss of deep expertise, an eroding client relationship, more reactive decisions, collapsing creativity, and the withdrawal of people who keep their best attention for personal projects. The last one costs the most. The employee stays, does what is asked and pulls their attention out of everything organisational. No presence indicator detects it.

So yes, the client who wants an answer within the hour is served faster by a connected team. That same client also notices distracted contacts and commitments that slip, which is exactly what a drained team produces. Followed to its end, the sceptic’s own argument lands on my side of the table.

What I would nuance

Three parts of my idea need the sceptic’s discipline.

• Leaders go first. A protected focus block that an executive interrupts twice stops existing for everyone. Without personal consistency from the top, the whole attention speech turns against whoever gives it.
• Crises will test the rules. Every crisis pushes people to break the protections, and an exception tolerated twice becomes the new rule. I would decide in advance what counts as a crisis.
• The levers differ. Cutting half the recurring meetings pays off within about a month, reducing active channels takes a quarter and meets resistance from teams attached to their tools, and protected focus time takes two to three months. Pick the lever that matches the drain your sample week reveals, or you will simply move the problem around.

My bias fits in one sentence: treat attention as a budget, with an envelope and trade-offs, because any topic without an envelope ends up consumed by whoever speaks loudest. The sceptic at the end of the table should recognise that logic, since it is how they already run capital.

Gabe Brown describes how improving his soil’s capacity to absorb water made his farm resilient to droughts that hurt his neighbours, without any extra irrigation equipment. I think responsiveness behaves the same way. So before the next debate about speed, I would put one question to that committee: how many hours a week do your teams actually spend on their job?

Read the original article (in French): Optimiser les flux d’énergie qui irriguent l’entreprise https://benjaminchaminade.com/charge-mentale-attention/

I’m Benjamin Chaminade, a French-Australian speaker, consultant and entrepreneur in management, HR and innovation.

L’écologie du travail : une vision systémique

L’écologie du travail élargit le cadre traditionnel de la Qualité de Vie et des Conditions de Travail (QVCT) en incluant des dimensions interconnectées :
- Environnement physique : espaces de travail ergonomiques, qualité de l’air, luminosité.
- Environnement social : relations avec collègues, clients et partenaires.
- Environnement culturel : valeurs d’entreprise, diversité, inclusion.
- Environnement économique et institutionnel** : contexte légal, innovation, inflation, politiques environnementales.

Cette approche intègre également les dimensions psychologiques (stress, épanouissement) et organisationnelles (structure hiérarchique, processus internes). Elle vise à améliorer la santé, la sécurité et l’engagement des salariés tout en s’adaptant aux transformations du travail, notamment dans un monde post-Covid.

Les enjeux majeurs de l’écologie du travail

1. Santé mentale et physique des collaborateurs
 — Stress et risques psychosociaux (RPS) : Touchant 60 % des salariés européens, ces facteurs entraînent absentéisme, burn-out et maladies cardiovasculaires.
 — Sécurité psychologique : Favoriser un climat propice à l’expression des idées réduit les risques de burn-out et améliore la productivité.

2. Engagement et motivation
 — Impact économique : Le désengagement coûte 7 800 milliards d’euros par an à l’économie mondiale (Gallup, 2022).
 — Attractivité et fidélisation : Des conditions de travail favorables diminuent le turnover et renforcent l’image employeur.

3. Performance organisationnelle
Un environnement de travail positif stimule la créativité, la collaboration et la productivité (+12 % selon l’Université de Warwick).

4. Impact sociétal et environnemental
Les entreprises engagées dans une démarche durable améliorent leur image, renforcent leur responsabilité sociale (RSE) et attirent des talents en quête de sens.

Principes clés du management régénératif

Le management régénératif repose sur des principes inspirés des écosystèmes naturels, appliqués à l’entreprise :

1. Interdépendance : Chaque décision affecte l’ensemble de l’organisation.
 — Exemple : Danone, avec son modèle CODES, favorise une collaboration inclusive et centrée sur l’humain.

2. Autonomie : Encourager l’autonomie et le bien-être des employés.
 — Exemple : Décathlon favorise l’initiative grâce à un management participatif.

3. Collaboration intensifiée : Réduire les frictions internes en valorisant l’intelligence collective.
 — Exemple : SNCF, avec ses « labs d’innovation », facilite la co-création entre équipes multidisciplinaires.

4. Responsabilisation : Donner aux salariés les moyens de prendre des initiatives.
 — Exemple : Michelin place ses collaborateurs au cœur des décisions grâce à une digitalisation au service de l’humain.

5. Adaptabilité et résilience : Favoriser la curiosité et l’expérimentation pour répondre aux changements.
 — Exemple : BlaBlaCar* qui organise des hackathons pour encourager l’innovation et la collaboration.

6. Diversité, équité et inclusion : Intégrer des perspectives variées pour enrichir l’organisation.
 — Exemple : Ynsect valorise les reconversions professionnelles et les profils atypiques.

7. Durabilité environnementale : Réduire l’impact écologique des activités.
 — *Exemple : AÉSIO Mutuelle* favorise la mobilité interne pour limiter le recrutement externe.

8. Transparence et éthique*: Assurer une communication ouverte et une gestion équitable.
 — Exemple : Time for the Planet promeut des prises de décision collectives et transparentes.

9. Développement professionnel continu : Offrir des parcours de formation alignés sur les valeurs de l’entreprise.
 — Exemple : Doctolib propose des programmes de formation via sa « Doctolib Academy ».

10. Participation des collaborateurs : Impliquer les employés dans la prise de décision.
 — Exemple : Fermes d’Avenir, qui organise des forums participatifs pour co-construire des solutions durables.

Bénéfices pour les entreprises

Adopter une écologie du travail permet de :
- Augmenter la productivité: +77 % de motivation grâce à des initiatives de QVCT (OQVT, 2023).
- Réduire l’absentéisme : Chaque euro investi dans la prévention des RPS rapporte 2,2 euros en économies (Malakoff Humanis, 2023).
- Renforcer l’attractivité : 60 % des cadres privilégient l’équilibre vie pro/perso dans le choix de leur emploi (APEC, 2023).
- Stimuler l’innovation : Les entreprises axées sur le bien-être sont 2,2 fois plus innovantes (OCDE, 2022).

Vers un avenir durable ?

L’écologie du travail et le management régénératif représentent un changement de paradigme en replaçant l’humain et l’environnement au cœur de l’entreprise. Cette approche ne se contente pas de minimiser les impacts négatifs ; elle aspire à créer une valeur positive pour toutes les parties prenantes. Dans un monde marqué par des crises interconnectées, adopter ces pratiques devient une nécessité pour construire des organisations durables, résilientes et porteuses de prospérité partagée.

Le management régénératif incarne ainsi l’avenir du travail, alliant bien-être des collaborateurs et performance globale.