It’s a question I’ve been coming back to more and more over the past few months.
As an organisational psychologist, I spend a lot of time thinking about learning, leadership, behaviour and organisational performance. Before that, I worked in learning and development, education, management and leadership development. Looking back, I realise I’ve really been exploring the same question throughout my career.
How do people become capable?
We tend to assume that capability comes from experience. Spend enough years in a role, complete enough training courses, gain enough exposure, and capability naturally follows. But I’m not sure that’s quite true.
Experience alone doesn’t explain why two people can spend the same amount of time doing similar work and emerge with very different levels of judgement, confidence or adaptability.
The learning sciences have known for decades that development isn’t simply a function of time or exposure. People don’t develop because work happens around them. They develop because of the experiences work demands of them. Capability is shaped through challenge, reflection, feedback, responsibility, relationships and opportunities to wrestle with uncertainty. It emerges through experience, not merely from experience.
That distinction feels increasingly important.
Think about the early years of almost any profession.
Junior consultants spend hours building slide decks and analysing data. Graduate accountants reconcile spreadsheets that few people will ever see. Trainee psychologists observe sessions, write formulations and gradually begin to trust their own professional judgement. Junior software developers debug code written by other people. Customer service advisers handle difficult conversations that require empathy, patience and careful communication.
None of these activities are particularly glamorous. Many look repetitive. Some appear to be exactly the kind of work organisations are now eager to automate.
Yet those tasks are doing far more than producing work. They are producing people.
Hidden inside seemingly routine work are developmental experiences. They teach people to notice patterns, ask better questions, defend their thinking, communicate clearly, tolerate ambiguity, understand systems and make decisions when the answer isn’t obvious.
Over time those experiences become judgement. They become expertise. They become confidence.
Eventually, they become professional identity.
That made me wonder what happens when those experiences disappear.
The conversation around AI has understandably focused on productivity. Organisations are asking which tasks can be automated, accelerated or delegated. Those are sensible questions, and many of the opportunities are exciting.
But I think another question deserves equal attention.
What if some of the work we’re removing isn’t valuable because of the output it produces, but because of the capability it develops?
Cleaning data might be teaching someone how to recognise patterns before they ever learn advanced analytics.
Writing the first draft of a report might be teaching analytical thinking before someone is trusted to write the executive summary.
Preparing slide decks might be where future leaders learn how strategy is translated into decisions.
Handling customer complaints might be where future managers develop empathy, emotional regulation and sound judgement under pressure.
Shadowing difficult conversations might be where future psychologists, coaches or HR professionals learn what no textbook can teach them.
Viewed through the lens of efficiency, these tasks often look routine. Viewed through the lens of human development, they may be foundational.
This isn’t an argument against automation.
Some work genuinely adds little developmental value and should disappear. Few people would argue that manually copying information between systems is an essential learning experience.
The challenge is that we don’t yet have a way of distinguishing between work that is merely repetitive and work that is developmentally significant.
Who decides which experiences matter?
How do we know which tasks can safely be delegated and which are essential stepping stones towards expertise?
At what point does removing work also remove the opportunity to develop the judgement needed for more complex work later?
These questions are much bigger than AI.
They’re questions about learning.
They’re questions about leadership.
They’re questions about work design.
They’re questions about organisational psychology.
Ultimately, they’re questions about how people become capable.
The more I explore this, the more I see we’ve become exceptionally good at designing organisations for efficiency while paying much less attention to designing organisations for human development.
Perhaps the organisations that thrive in the future won’t simply be those that adopt the best technology.
Perhaps they’ll be the ones that understand how capability actually develops, protect the experiences that matter, and intentionally design work that helps people grow.
I don’t have all the answers yet, but I have a growing sense that this may be one of the most important organisational questions of the next decade.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Looking back over your own career, which experiences shaped you the most?
And if someone started in your organisation tomorrow, would they still have the opportunity to experience those same moments of development?
