Learn Faster

Have you ever watched the same mistake happen twice in your company and thought… "didn't we fix this already?"

Yeah. Me too. About a hundred times.

For a long time, when something went wrong at Sagan, the response looked like this: someone tags someone on Slack. Someone sends an email that says "hey, be more careful about checking XYZ." Everyone nods. Everyone moves on. Six months later? Same mistake. Different person. Gross.

Whack-a-mole.

Here's what finally clicked: the problem wasn't the people.

Nobody owned the system for getting better!

Knowledge lived in individual heads. Training was "shadow someone for a week and good luck."

So back in January, I started chatting with Brian Wilson about what we were calling "Training Command," borrowed from the Marine Corps, where the institutional learning apparatus sits under one roof. Not a side project. Not task #47 on someone's already-full plate. A real function, with real people, and a real budget.

Brian Wilson took the concept, made it his own, and renamed it: the Capability Development Department. CDD.

His framing to our exec team is what sold me. "Capability Development increases what you and your team are capable of doing. Execution is still owned by you." It isn't HR in a new outfit. It's a team whose whole job is making people better at their jobs, and then getting out of the way.

Brian's the right person for this because he's done it before. He spent awhile in the Marine Corps as a Counterintelligence Officer, including deployments to Bosnia, East Africa, and Iraq.

But the part that matters most here: he ran the Marine Corps Counterintelligence/Human Intelligence School for seven years. That's seven years of designing training curricula, building evaluation standards, and running live role-play scenarios where the stakes were a lot higher than a sales call. When you've built training programs that prepare people for intelligence operations, building one for account managers isn't exactly uncharted territory.

Brian and his team published founding documents, launched a pilot with our recruiting team, and started building baseline standards for what "good" actually looks like. Not vibes. Measurable, trainable, repeatable skills.

Now here's where it gets fun.

Today, Brian sends me a DM. Totally unsolicited. He wants to hire actors.

He's probably right that I don't have the range. But coming from a guy who ran role-play training for Marine intelligence for seven years and produced "Shakespeare in the Bar” when he got out, I'll take it.

I said yes before I finished reading.

Brian identified himself as the bottleneck for quality role play. Rather than accepting that, he's breaking the constraint by bringing in people whose literal profession is inhabiting characters and reacting in real time. For five hundred bucks.

Think about how your people currently learn customer-facing skills. They practice on live customer. They learn by screwing up real conversations with real money on the table. You wouldn't let a pilot learn by flying passengers. But we let account managers learn by managing accounts. It's insane when you say it out loud.

Actors simulating the upset customer, the indecisive buyer, the person who ghosts after onboarding?

That's a flight simulator for your team.

I don't know yet if CDD will be the most important org decision we made this year. Too early. But every organization I've admired shares one thing: they made the institution smarter, not just the individuals. Lessons learned on Tuesday showed up in training on Wednesday.

If you run a team of more than ten people and nobody's job is making the team better at their jobs, I'd sit with that for a minute. Doesn't need to be a department. Could be one person with a clear mandate. But somebody's got to own it, or the moles win.

And sometimes the answer is hiring actors for thirty bucks an hour. Who knew.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

Passage of the Week:

"We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training."

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