Built For Next Tuesday

A Note Before We Begin

Like most entrepreneurs, I’m passionate about the industry I’m in and believe in its value.

Naturally curious, I’ve invested time reading anything and everything I can on workplace training for professionals, while also reviewing years of information and feedback gathered through our own work.

We have daily conversations with clients. These organizations are describing critical workplace skills that need support: the behaviours that determine whether people can make sound decisions, create clarity, carry ownership, communicate under pressure, and follow through when the work gets messy.

Basically, these conversations come down to workplace friction. Something could run more smoothly, and the organization is looking for a way to make the work better. The skills involved are often called “soft skills.” A better term is “execution capabilities.”

There is nothing ‘soft’ about behaviours that hold work together. That language has made these capabilities sound optional, personal, and secondary, when they’re actually part of the infrastructure of performance. Without them, work does not move forward in the way organizations need it to.

What makes this interesting and complex is that work is changing faster than ever. If work has changed, what should training look like to best support today’s organizational performance?

To answer that, we need to step back before we look closely. We need to understand the pressure organizations are under, the capabilities they’re trying to build, and why so much work breaks down between intention and execution.

If you know me, you know this is the kind of problem I like to take apart.

Our findings are shaping our path and I hope they can help you along yours.

Together we grow,
David

The Friction of Speed

Why faster work is creating more pressure than progress.

We all know the world of work is moving faster. That’s not the interesting part anymore. The real issue is what that speed is doing to organizations already under pressure.

In Canada, that pressure is evident in the productivity conversation. The Bank of Canada has been clear that weak productivity affects growth, wages, competitiveness, and our ability to absorb inflation. The country needs more value from the work already being done. Yet many organizations are responding to the pressure by asking already stretched people to move faster.

Organizations are pushing forward with bigger ambitions, tighter timelines, digital transformation, service improvement, growth mandates, and deeper demands on the people delivering the mission. Expectations are not easing in response to that pressure. They are rising. And as expectations rise, the cost of unclear work rises with them.

The problem is that these ambitions usually land on capacity that is already strained. There’s almost never a clean runway, extra headcount, or a quiet period where the organization can pause and rebuild itself properly. People are asked to keep the business moving while also changing how the business moves.

That is where macro pressure becomes human pressure.

Stress and burnout are not side issues. They are on the rise to alarming levels (workplace benefits providers would attest to this). When people are overloaded, judgment gets thinner. Clarity takes more effort. Follow-through becomes harder to maintain. The work does not always stop, but its quality and reliability suffer.

AI is now being added to that same environment. It can help, but it’s not a rescue plan on its own. More output does not automatically create better results. AI may change how work is produced, but it does not remove the need for sound human execution.

That’s the part organizations cannot bypass. Strategy doesn’t execute itself. Technology doesn’t create alignment by itself. Work still moves through people, and many of those people are already operating close to capacity.

So the question becomes:

How are organizations supposed to move work faster and better when the people carrying it are already under this much pressure?

The Capability Trap

Why having the skills, tools, and people still doesn’t guarantee the work will move.

If organizations are going to move faster without simply burning people out, they need to understand what kind of capability they’re actually trying to build. Pressure doesn’t release just because people work harder. It releases when work becomes easier to move: clearer, cleaner, better coordinated, and less dependent on heroic effort. In order for organizations to reduce this pressure, they need to increase their capabilities.

That’s why capabilities have to be understood as bigger than skills. A skill can live inside one person. A capability has to hold across the organization. It is the combined strength of people, processes, tools, habits, and expectations that allows work to move reliably. One strong employee can carry a project for a while, but they cannot compensate forever for unclear handoffs, weak ownership, poor systems, or inconsistent execution around them. Eventually, the load finds the weakest point.

Organizational capability is built across people with different experiences, habits, strengths, and ways of working. That is the reality of any workforce. It means consistent performance cannot depend on the assumption that everyone already shares the same understanding of how work should move. When the standard is invisible, consistency becomes accidental. If the organization needs reliable execution, the behaviours behind that execution have to be made deliberate.

It also means organizations need to be more precise about the capabilities that support performance. Organizational performance is not supported by one type of individual skill. It depends on three capability pillars working together: task capability, tool and workflow capability, and execution capability.

Task capability and tool capability matter. They are also the easiest to see, fund, and structure. Technical knowledge can be tested. Tools can be rolled out. Processes can be mapped. But as the work changes faster, those capabilities are constantly being updated, replaced, or rebuilt. If organizations invest only there, they risk preparing people for the current version of the work while leaving them underprepared for the next version.

That is why execution capability is becoming more important, not less.

Major workforce frameworks point in the same direction. The Government of Canada’s Skills for Success framework treats communication, collaboration, adaptability, problem-solving, and digital capability as foundational skills for work and learning. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs work points the same way, identifying analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, leadership, and social influence among core workforce skills.

Canadian research from Future Skills Centre and Conference Board also shows growing Canadian employer demand for social and emotional skills, especially communication, collaboration, listening, empathy, and emotional intelligence. The language varies, but the conclusion is consistent: organizations need people who can keep work moving when the answer is not already built into the task, the tool, or the process.

The point is not that task and tool capability are less important. The point is that they aren’t enough. Unfortunately, organizations often bury or neglect the execution pillar. They treat it as part of the task, as if good technical people will naturally know how to coordinate under pressure. Or they treat it as part of the tool, as if a better system will automatically create better judgment. Or they hide execution under “soft skills,” which makes it sound personal, optional, and hard to inspect.

It is also the least visible pillar. Task capability can be credentialed. Tool capability can be tracked and, in many cases, certified, even. Execution capability usually shows up indirectly, in whether the work moves swiftly or stumbles. That makes it easier to overlook, even as it carries more of the load required to turn technical knowledge and workplace systems into results. As skills demands evolve faster than traditional systems can respond, the OECD argues for more agile lifelong learning and better alignment with labour-market needs. That’s exactly the pressure organizations are feeling throughout the workday.

And that is the trap. The more work depends on execution, the more organizations need it to be visible, teachable, and reinforced. Yet it remains the pillar organizations are least likely to support because they often assume people already have it. That assumption is becoming too expensive to ignore.

So the question becomes:

If execution capability is carrying more of the work, where can organizations see it clearly enough to build it?

The Missing Moment

Why organizations invest in execution but still struggle to see, support, and reinforce what changes.

Organizations don’t need a dashboard to know when execution is breaking down. They can see it when people are working hard, but the work is not moving clearly, reliably, or with enough ownership.

When that happens, organizations look for ways to release pressure. Systems, process changes, role design, automation, and outside expertise can all matter. But they are easier to justify because they are visible. The harder question is where the next investment will actually improve how work moves.

Training for execution is one of those options, but it’s not the easiest one to get excited about. Training for execution can be harder to justify because the capability it develops is not always immediately visible. In many cases, a capability they assumed people already had when they were hired. It asks them to believe that clearer behaviour can improve performance, even when that behaviour is harder to inspect than a task, process, or tool.

That hesitation is understandable. If someone was hired for the role, should they not already know how to communicate, prioritize, manage commitments, or follow through? The uncomfortable answer is that modern work is putting more pressure on those behaviours than most organizations were built to support. Even when people have these skills, their application often varies too much across employees, managers, and teams.

That is why the training investment matters, even if it is often underfunded. Future Skills Centre and LMIC estimate that Canadian firms invest about $240 per employee annually in training and lag international peers in training rates and hours. Statistics Canada also reported that only 29.7% of Canadian workers aged 25 to 64 participated in job-related non-formal training in the 12 months ending November 2024. When resources are limited, organizations naturally favour investments they can define, observe, and defend.

Because development dollars are limited, organizations often put them where the case is easiest to defend: task capability and tool and workflow capability. They also invest in execution capability, but frequently through development methods that make the learning harder for the organization to see and support. Coaching is one example. The International Coaching Federation estimated 109,200 coach practitioners globally in 2022, a 54% increase from 2019, showing clear demand for more personal and targeted development. Coaching can be a powerful, custom option. But the confidential nature of the work can make it harder for the organization to know which actual behaviour is being developed, what support is needed, or how a manager should reinforce it.

The same visibility problem appears in other forms of development. Self-directed and AI-supported learning can help people build skills, but they can also separate learning from the manager, the team, and the flow of work. The individual may learn, while the organization remains unclear about what changed or what should now be supported.

That matters because execution capability is not built by information alone. It develops when people have to apply judgment, communicate clearly, carry ownership, and follow through under real conditions. As Canadians, we understand this instinctively: you can learn the rules of hockey from a book, but that does not mean you can play the game. At some point, you have to get on the ice.

That is the missing moment. It is the point where training either becomes useful in the flow of work or stays theoretical. Broad skill-based training often stops before that point. It gives people useful content and tools, but leaves them to decide when each one applies, how it should be adapted, and what good application looks like. Faced with that uncertainty and the pressure of the workday, people may misapply the learning or return to the approach they already know.

Training has to move closer to that point of use: the moment where the learning is needed. Not just closer to the topic. Not just closer to the learner. Rather than beginning with a broad skill and leaving participants to find the application, course design should begin with the common workplace moments organizations need to improve and work backwards from there. It means identifying the moments that matter early enough to reduce guesswork and make better execution easier to recognize, support, and repeat.

So the question becomes:

How can training make the moments that matter easier to recognize, support, and improve?

Built for Next Tuesday

Training only matters when it becomes visible back at work.

If execution capability is carrying more of the load, training has to meet people closer to where execution actually happens: back at work.

This is where PMC has a role to play. PMC focuses on the execution layer: the human behaviours that determine whether work moves cleanly when pressure, ambiguity, competing priorities, and other people are involved.

That also means being honest about what training can’t do. Training can’t rescue a strategy people don’t understand. It can’t fix broken systems, poor resourcing, unclear authority, or leadership conditions that work against the behaviours being taught. If the environment is creating the problem, a workshop should not pretend to be the cure.

But when the issue is human execution, our training has a real responsibility. It should get closer to the moments where execution capability is tested and be clearer about what is supposed to change. Not just what topic was covered. Not just what skill was introduced. It should be clear about the behaviour that should become visible back at work, the capability that behaviour is intended to strengthen, and the performance outcome it should help support.

That is the philosophy behind ‘Built for Next Tuesday.’

Next Tuesday is not literal. It’s the first real moment after training when the learning has to survive contact with the workday. It is the first real moment after training when a participant has to clarify, decide, communicate, adapt, take ownership, or follow through under real workplace conditions.

Making that moment more visible is only fair to organizations. They are investing real money, time, and trust. That visibility helps organizations judge whether training is contributing to better execution rather than simply recording that someone attended.

It’s fairer to employees. People should not be pulled out of work, given a broad concept, and then sent back into pressure to figure out on their own what “better” is supposed to look like. Clarity reduces guesswork and less guesswork is better for everyone.

It’s also fairer to managers and people leaders. They are responsible for ensuring the work of others gets done properly and seeing their teams succeed. As such, they should see, know and understand the training their team is receiving so that they can support it properly.

Built for Next Tuesday is PMC’s commitment to that standard.

Visibility cannot remain an aspiration. It has to become a part of the design discipline.

So how do we make something as hard to see as execution visible enough to design training around the moments that matter?

Moving Beyond Practical

Practical was the promise. What happens next is the test.

• Need: What work issue or execution outcome matters enough to train toward?
• Skill: What must participants become better able to do?
• Moment: Where will that skill be tested back at work?
• Behaviour: What should someone actually do in that moment?
• Capability: What becomes more reliable when that behaviour is used consistently across people, teams, or roles?
• Performance Outcome: What work result should improve when that capability becomes more reliable?

We aren’t claiming to have invented application. That would be arrogant, and it would be false. The best facilitators, instructional designers, coaches, managers, and learning leaders have always cared about whether training gets used back at work. The issue is not belief in transfer. The issue is that transfer has often been too invisible, too assumed, and too dependent on the participant figuring out alone what better should look like back at work.

For a long time, the training industry moved in the right direction by becoming more practical. Training had to get away from abstract theory and closer to usable tools, practice, and workplace language. PMC has been part of that history, and we still believe in it. Practical training matters. A workshop should not feel detached from the work people actually do.

The practical model generally followed a simple path:

Need → Content → Skill

An organization had a need. A workshop was built around content. That content developed a recognizable skill. Communication, leadership, accountability, supervision, and other familiar labels helped buyers find training and helped providers organize it.

That model is not wrong. It’s incomplete. For many execution problems, knowing what to do is not the real bottleneck anymore. The harder part is knowing when to use it. Just as importantly, it is knowing what good should look like when the skill is actually used.

The uncomfortable truth is that broad skills are easier for the industry to sell than precise application. They’re familiar and searchable. They allow one course to feel relevant to many people for many reasons. That can be useful, but it can also hide the harder question: what is this training actually supposed to change?

This is where practical training can start to lose its line of sight. A workshop can contain useful material and still become a loose collection of ideas. The participant leaves with useful concepts, but still has to decide what matters most, where it applies, and what should change back at work. Managers and organizations may know someone attended training, but not what behaviour or performance to look for or reinforce.

That is the hidden burden of stopping at ‘skill’.

That burden is getting heavier because skill content is everywhere now. Access can help individual learning, but it does not automatically build shared capability. The individual can learn while the organization still lacks a common standard.

Our direction is to make the path more visible.

We aren’t saying every workshop becomes narrow, rigid, or reduced to one scenario. We’re saying the design needs a stronger through-line from the reason the training exists to the performance improvement it is meant to support.

That through-line extends the model:

Need → Skill → Moment → Behaviour → Capability → Performance Outcome

The need explains why the training matters. The skill identifies what the individual must become better able to do. The moment identifies where that skill will be tested back at work. The behaviour makes the skill visible in that moment. When that behaviour becomes more consistent across people, teams, or roles, it strengthens organizational capability. The performance outcome names what should improve when that capability becomes more reliable.

Content still matters, but it plays a different role in this model. It is not another stage between the need and the skill. It is selected and organized around the through-line. The content should help participants understand the skill, recognize the moments where it matters, practise the behaviour, and use tools or structures that make the behaviour easier to apply back at work.

That is the change.

The through-line keeps training from becoming a loose collection of useful things. It gives the participant, the manager, and the organization a clearer view of where the learning matters, what should be supported, and how the investment connects back to the work.

Just as importantly, the through-line helps set the norm before the moment goes wrong. It gives managers, participants, and teams a shared understanding of what good execution is supposed to look like in practice. That is how training starts to build organizational capability instead of isolated individual learning: people across roles, teams, and divisions are working from a more consistent standard.

Example of the Through-Line in Action

The 3-Zone Manager, in one workplace moment

This is the direction PMC is working toward: not abandoning practical training, but making it more visible, more applied, and more directly connected to the performance outcomes organizations need training to support.

The Through-Line

If we believe training should be visible, our own design has to prove it.

A commitment to visibility only matters if it changes how training is built.

Over the years, PMC has documented the challenges organizations bring to us through client conversations, course requests, customization work, participant feedback, and facilitator observations. Those patterns have helped us identify the common workplace moments organizations are trying to improve.

That is where our design work now begins. Rather than starting with a broad topic and deciding how much material we can fit into a course, we work backwards from these observed and expressed needs. We identify the skill people require, the moments where it must be used, the behaviour that should become visible, the organizational capability that behaviour can strengthen, and the performance outcome it is intended to support.

The content is then built around that through-line.

That may sound straightforward, but it is difficult design work. It requires judgment, expertise, and a willingness to decide what matters most. The traditional approach has often been to give participants a broad collection of skills and leave them to determine what to use, when to use it, and what good application should look like. That is no longer enough. Courses need to make those connections more deliberately, which means removing material that may be interesting but does not help participants understand the skill, recognize the moment, or use the behaviour. That creates more room for clearer explanation, stronger examples, focused practice, useful insight, and tools participants can apply when the situation arises at work. The result can be perceived as less content. In reality, it’s more deliberate content.

That structure does not mean the content is rigid. The core learning has to be clear and consistent, while still being flexible enough to work across different organizations, roles, and ways of getting work done. That often requires more than teaching a skill or framework. Participants also need to develop the judgment to recognize when the learning applies, how to adapt it to the situation, and what an appropriate response looks like for them.

That discipline should continue after the facilitated session ends. Participants need a quick-reference resource they can return to when the relevant moment arises. It should help them recognize the situation, recall the approach, and make the next move without searching through a long workbook.

Managers need a different view. They do not need to retake the course through a written recap. They need a concise explanation of what the participant learned, which behaviours the course is intended to strengthen, and what they can support or reinforce back at work. That gives the learning a better chance of becoming visible and sustained rather than remaining with the individual who attended.

Together, these elements create a clearer line of sight from design through application. The through-line guides the course. The content supports it. The post-course resources help participants and managers carry it back into the work.

We are also using this structure to organize our courses into clearer pathways. Pathways are more than a way to group related topics. They help people and organizations see where to begin, what to build next, and how different courses contribute to execution capability over time. Each course should have a clear purpose, less unnecessary overlap, and a visible relationship to the courses around it.

The same approach applies across open-enrolment and client-specific training. For open-enrolment courses, we design around recurring workplace needs and moments that appear across organizations. For client-specific work, we can examine the organization’s own challenges more closely and configure the course, pathway, or sequence around the moments it most needs to improve or that are truly unique to them.

This work is always evolving. PMC is small enough to listen closely, learn from clients and participants, and adjust when a course contains too much, leaves a gap, or no longer connects tightly enough to the work. The benefit is that organizations who engage with us are always getting up-to-date best practices instead of a tired offering that no longer fits the modern workplace.

That is how Built for Next Tuesday moves from philosophy to practice.

The Question Every Training Provider Should Answer

If training claims to improve and sustain performance, the line back to work should be visible.

This approach is a deliberate direction, not a claim of perfection.

We’re human beings running a business, and we know we won’t get every detail right. We’ll keep learning from our clients, testing what works, and adjusting what doesn’t. Visibility is not only something we’re asking of training; it’s something we have to practise ourselves.

That’s what Built for Next Tuesday means to us: a commitment to make training clearer about the need it addresses, the behaviour it is meant to strengthen, the capability that behaviour should help build, and the performance outcome it is intended to support.

The future of training is not more content. It is clearer execution standards. If organizations are being asked to invest in training, providers should be able to show how that investment connects back to the work. Not as a guarantee that performance will change overnight, but as a clearer and more honest line of sight.

And it leaves every organization with a fair question to ask before choosing any training provider:

Can the training provider show you how the investment connects to the work, or are they asking you to trust that it will?