By Nigel Paine

David Hockney is acknowledged as one of the greatest C20th Century British painters.  Over an astonishingly long career he has tried to reinvent himself again and again. Reinvent geographically; moving from his home near Bradford to the sunny uplands of Los Angeles; from LA to the intense rural environment of Normandy. Reinvent technically: he has gone from painting in oils, to painting in acrylics, to photography using a polaroid camera, to digital photography and on to creating on an iPad. And finally reinventing himself conceptually by challenging conventional notions of point of view, perspective and layout.  The result is an artist who always pushes the boundaries. He never sits back and rests on his considerable laurels.  He inspires by his tireless vision, and his endless curiosity about the visceral nature of the world in front of his eyes. You can read the last blog for more details of how this manifests in his latest exhibition.

One of the most striking thing about Hockney’s long career is his restless curiosity; Hockney never asks what art is, but how art can illuminate and offer different insights about the world. It is a means to an end not an introspective process in and for itself. This is parallel to a simple but powerful statement from the Buddhist theologian Vishnapani.  He said recently: “The real question for Buddhism is not what consciousness is, but what it is for.”  I would flip that: the real question for L&D is not what particular processes we use but what we are really, fundamentally doing inside an organization. What is the purpose of L&D? What is it for?  If your answer is to deliver courses, you are missing the point entirely.  If it is to help organizations, and the individuals who work in them and with them, flourish you are closer to the mark. But what flourishing means is double-edged. On the one hand, it is about individuals feeling more comfortable and more creative and more competent in their roles. On the other, it is about organizations building environments where people can flourish and they can be successful. A happy individual inside a failing organization is only happy for so long!

The only way that you can build exciting environments, is to viscerally understand what gets in the way of doing good work.  And that is not static; everyone’s perception of work and what they want from it is changing, and the jobs they do are morphing. If you cannot even get people’s attention, or enable actions that make their lives easier, I am not sure what you think you are going to achieve in the long term.

If you look at the recently published WorkMonitor Survey for 2023 you will see two notable statistics: “I am worried about the impact of economic uncertainty on my job security” 52% of respondents agreed, and 34% said that they would quit their job because of a toxic workplace culture; this was linked to 77% of respondents agreeing that an employer’s values and purpose were very important. This is a post-Covid view of the world.  These sentiments are stronger in the younger workforce but by no means isolated to one demographic. Work is changing and L&D has the power to shape that future or become marginalised.

There is an enormous agenda out there for L&D and by looking inward at process and not outward at the source of the challenges for workers, L&D could making itself irrelevant.  The German Chancellor made a famous speech in the Reichstag in Berlin on the 24th of February 2022. He claimed that the new circumstances in the world were a “Zeitenwende” an historic turning point and Germany had to shift some of its long-held beliefs and policies as a result. There was a strong sense that Otto Schultz was saying we must participate in a new way, or we marginalise ourselves. 

We are at such a point in our organizations, where our expectations and our ability to cope have been turned on their heads. L&D is critical for the future of healthy organizations but only if it embraces those changes and shifts its focus to what really matters.