The evolving referents and use of the terms “customising” and

“customisation” as the stakeholders’ “sophisticat[ion]”, “maturity”,

“capability”, and challenges evolve

47 The HoLDCs and BankSeta participants state that it is the Head of Skills Development in the respective banks that are part of the BankSeta “skills development committee” (M-BSeta) and planning process, as these are the functions that formally report to the BankSeta on the banks’

skills development planning and delivery as mandated by the Skills Development Act (1998 and amended 2008). The banks make submissions and report to the BankSeta through the mandatory annual Workplace Skills Plan (WSP) and Annual Training Report (ART) respectively. These inform the BankSeta’s Sector Skills Plan and the planning of the BankSeta. Past-M-BSeta does indicate that “most of HR directors sit in our [BankSeta] board”. The above seems to reflect the organisational structure of the large banks, where leadership development and skills development are differentiated as separate “function[s]” (HOLDC-B). This can be seen more clearly with HOLDC-D2 and HOLDC-Z who are the two HoLDC that are more knowledgeable about the BankSeta IEDP and the “committee” given their previous portfolio (of the skills development function) or current portfolio (comprising skills/talent and leadership development) respectively.

The research participants appear to utilise the descriptive term “customising” as a contrast to “off-the-shelf” (HOLDC-C2, HOLDC-D1 and HOLDC-D2) and the terms “generic” (HOLDC-B, HOLDC-D2, HOLDC-Z, Coach3, PDBS, M-BSeta, Del-2, Del-8 and Del-11), “standard” (HOLDC-A, HOLDC-B, Past-PM-DBS, PM-DBS and BSeta CEO), and “conventional” (DBS-TM). The terms

“customising” and “customisation” seem to be used with different referents and in different ways. One finds the terms used in reference or relation to “content”,

“module[s]”, “themes”, “process”, “learning style”, “structure” and “creative modalities”. There appears to be the continuous movement and shifting of focus between the elements of a programme and the programme or sets of programmes as a whole; between the nature, constitution, or structure of the elements to the structure and organisation of the programme as a whole, including the sequencing of simultaneous and parallel processes within the programme. There also seems to be the shifts in focus from the individual delegate-learner, the organisation to the programme as a whole (“[tying] everything together end to end and [..] hand pick certain things to tie into the overall journey” (HOLDC-D1)). Below one finds the range of use amongst the HoLDCs:

“I mean I’ve seen that, that’s the kind of off the shelf, that is like there’s an allergy to that in [the bank] we don’t do that at all. Every now and then we get things that are really good, that fit well with us and then we take them on, but mostly we customise, [..] and we do a lot of embedded learning, so recognising that leadership -- it happens within a kind of social context and within this DNA and within a culture. What we actually try and do is make people competent in navigating that discourse. [..] We don’t really bother too much with theoretical or academic learning it’s very much about meeting the right people, getting to know them, working with them, doing applied learning, action learning projects and connecting with the Exco, and so doing things that kind of orients you to the culture, that’s the most powerful thing that can possibly happen.” (HOLDC-D1)

“[..] so we tie everything together end to end and we hand pick certain things to tie into the overall journey.” (HOLDC-D1)

“[..] always be referring back to what the business strategy is -- so this was our standard offering, [..] where that leadership designer is critical is in customised programmes so that one I showed you around business banking you would have taken elements of the [“Strategic Leadership Programme”] as content pieces, but you would have overarchingly built or designed a customised programme that was specific for a point in time for a group of individuals [..]so we rather say what is the shift that you’re trying to achieve and what’s the experience we would create for those individuals in order to achieve that, and although we use immersions into local markets the other thing we use is immersions into our own business.”

(HOLDC-B)

“[..] customising content pieces [and the] process” of leadership development programmes and interventions. (HOLDC-B)

“We want to tell them which module speaks to our business.” (HOLDC-Z)

“[..] what’s on the shelf is what you are getting. Now it has to be customised, it has to be -- you might have the basic material, but I’d like you to come in and listen to what I’m doing, reshaping the material, and then we deliver this thing.” (HOLDC-C2)

“let’s make leadership development more customised to each individual and find them where they are at because we can be at exactly the same programme but we could be there for different reasons.” (HOLDC-A)

“[..] and how I would like to see it evolve is where we really meet people where they are at and maybe this goes back to a year-old debate around learning styles even. I hate saying that word but it is.” (HOLDC-A)

“Not to have this mould and to accept that everybody would fit into that mould. Individualised training.” (HOLDC-D2)

“I’ll guess the business schools need to start participating in this type of conversation. We need to think together. We need more research to be done so that we can see how to better support one another. I think if business schools come to us with the old philosophies of learning, they’re going to be dead in the water, definitely.” (HOLDC-A)

The participants from the Business School seem to suggest that the “customised content” is “industry specific”, but also not organised and presented in the traditional disciplinary divisions:

“Again there are what we call conventional content and there is what you call the customised content. So surely there will be variation. If it’s the automobile industry there will be more on the supply chain, there will be more on the quality management. The bank is different. We are going to look in the financials. You are going to look in the risk.” (DBS-TM)

“I think [leadership development] is going to become an awful lot more industry specific. I think they will become a lot more customised, [..] a lot more action learning orientated [..] and I think there will be less generic stuff and much more specific. I think you have to start with generic.

People need a fundamental understanding of what is this about, but I think you’re going to move an awful lot quicker. So instead of talking about strategy, environmental analysis, I'm going to talk about it in the banking industry. And that holds for leadership and management.” (Coach3)

HOLDC-B and IBS-MD appear to differentiate “customising” from “tailoring”.

Tailoring seems to refer to the “tweaking” or “adapt[ing]” (IBS-MD) of an established or existing framework or programme. For example, HOLDC-B refers to her Leadership Development Centre’s team “tailoring” the organisation’s

“leadership architecture” (the “levels” of “leadership essentials” and

“management essentials” as defined through the organisation’s “competency framework”) and the established and aligned development programmes to the

“needs” and required “learning experience” of the “business” or “line managers”.

She states that “majority of the time you always working off the same framework but you are tailoring it depending on the need of the business”. IBS-MD differentiates “tailoring” and “customising” in designing and delivering leadership development for organisations as follows. Customising means having a conversation with a “blank sheet of paper” and to “co-create” with the stakeholders:

“I have been in this industry for a long time, is that most of us talk about customisation and actually it is really just a tweaking of what exists. So it is a tailoring, more than it is a customisation. If you take a product that you already have and adapt this and adapt that in the product, you tailoring it to fit the client. Essentially because of the NQF [South African National Qualifications Framework] and who the Universities are, you are not really creating a true customisation. So customisation is when you really have a blank sheet of paper, truly, and can say let’s design. Let’s co-create with the client, and that is what [the international Business School she is employed at] does. That is the key difference [from the local Business Schools who “adhere” to, and comply with, the NQF and qualifications requirements.” (italics and underlining added)

One finds a similar theme of the “blank page” with the HoLDCs:

“They should come with a blank page and understand the business needs.

Right now we fit people to what is offered out there, rather than the other way around.” (HOLDC-Z)

“[..] but to truly drop what they’re [Business Schools and consulting companies] currently doing and say okay, what are your needs, what kind of organisation is this, what are we trying to do here and to have a philosophical openness I find is quite hard, and to be creative.” (HOLDC-D1)

“so I mean in designing programmes I think it’s critical to firstly understand who we are designing for because it’s not a one size fits all right, it’s not a one size fits all.” (HOLDC-C2)

HOLDC-C1 seems to suggest that the beginning with a ‘blank page’ is applicable to the actual learning and development “process” as well, not just the contracting or initial designing phases. She states that one aims to “create a context” for the

“process” of leadership development, for “co-design[ing]”, and the emergence of the delegates’ own “voices” and “theories about life, about leadership, about relationships”. One does not ‘enter the room’ and adhere to or impose a preconceived “agenda”, “structure” and outlook. In this way the delegates or

“leaders” themselves become the very “content” of the leadership development programme.

“My sense is if - let people develop their own theories [in and through the development programmes they attend]. That’s what we do as well. We say you develop your own theory. How do you create a context [within the leadership development programmes] for people to develop their own theories? [..]You have an idea of what you want to do but you change the process in the here-and-now because the people [the delegates] in the room co-design the process without them knowing that they’re doing it.

[..] So it is not my agenda that I know what theme I want to work in. [So

“create a context” for them to] know that these theories exist, but that [they] have their own theories and their own methodology. So I would like people to develop their own theory about life, about leadership, about relationships, given that, so to say, you know what this is the world out there and there’s a lot of theories but what is your theory. [..] find your own voice.”

HOLDC-A speaks of “meet[ing the delegates of programmes] where they are at”

rather than the “stock standard” and “sausage machine”:

“[..]make leadership development more customised to each individual and find them where they are at [..] to meet people where they are at and not have this stock standard stuff that we offer our people all the time. It’s as though we putting people through a sausage machine just to get them developed and I’m not sure that we seeing the best impact in terms of that.”

Although one can conceptually differentiate between “generic”, “standard[ised]”,

“tailor[ed]” and “customised” leadership development programmes and interventions, one finds the practice of blending standardising, tailoring and customising of leadership development within the banks and the BankSeta IEDP.

This is through the programme lifecycle from contracting, designing, developing to delivering leadership development and working with the “process” (HOLDC-C1) of learning and personal development. HOLDC-D2 provides a description of actual practice:

“You start with your need. Like I say, and sometimes I use various programmes. Sometimes people attend you know competency based training as well as a formal programme and they get individual coaching to fill all the gaps to make sure that we get where we want to be. There’s nothing that you can take off the shelf. Everybody’s different, everybody’s got different needs. And you have to take out of each programme what you need.”

HOLDC-D1 shares the balancing of the “internal environment”, the “external environment”, “the suppliers” of leadership development programmes and interventions, and the “time” constraints pressure she experiences for the “effort”

needed to design a custom programme, to deliver such a programme, and realising immediate “results” for the line management.

“So there is always -- these are things we’ve got to work with. We’ve got to work with the fact that you’re dealing with quite a closed-minded, traditionalist mindset in an internal environment, and then on an external environment there’s suppliers who’ve got off-the-shelf things and who

don’t want to spend the time redesigning and the effort, and they don’t have the creativity. [But with “time” pressures] yes you end up saying, “ag let’s just do a strategy module”, ja that’s cool, strategy is fine, let’s do operational excellence, let’s do blah-blah, you know the usual -- it ends up looking like a mini MBA which is really, really not what I want to do and I feel like I compromised myself in producing something like that.”

She states that one needs to compromise, but in negotiating these “environments”

and the design or “redesigning” of leadership development one can be

“comprising too much”: “I think [it is about] finding a compromise, I think I compromise too much, but I’m starting to compromise less.” The past programme manager of the BankSeta IEDP at the Delta Business School shares his experience with compromising, improvising and negotiating the design of leadership development programmes. On designing the “right content” of the programme, Past-PM-DBS suggests that it is part “standard”, part “trial and error” and part

“experimental” as well as being open to the nuances and different needs and expectations across different cohorts attending the programme over time.⁴⁸ It would seem that across the various cohorts of delegates and within a single cohort there is the need for tailoring, customising, adapting, and improvising.

“The other is maybe just getting the right content [for the BankSeta IEDP], which is a little bit by trial and error, so we would choose a module and sometimes it does work well, because very often we were choosing from Cass [Business School], so we got this, this and this, so we’d take that, but sometimes it doesn’t work as you would want, so maybe not knowing how the groups will appreciate what has been given to them when they get to the overseas destinations. And we’ve also here, we’ve experimented with sessions and they haven’t worked. We dropped them. [..] we tried.

Sometimes it just doesn’t work.”

48 The discussion of the BankSeta IEDP delegates’ experiences and narrating in chapter six provides one a sense of the nuances, complexities and dynamics within a specific cohort and iteration of a programme.

“If you change your programme and somebody doesn’t like it because it’s too short, next year they don’t like it either.” (italics added)

Coach3 suggests that in general the organisational stakeholders “have become more sophisticated” on “what’s available and knowledgeable of what they want”.

This means an evolving and increasing demand for “industry specific”, business specific and “customised” development programmes and interventions.

“[..] I think our target markets, CEOs and human resource directors, have become a lot more sophisticated. I think their knowledge of what’s available and knowledge of what they want -- sometimes this can be a problem because you never get to the real thing.” (Mark)

However, one may need to differentiate “levels of maturity” (HOLDC-B, HOLDC-Z and HOLDC-A), “appetite” (HOLDC-D1 and HOLDC-B) and “buy-in” (C2, D1, Z, B, A and HOLDC-D2) across and within their respective organisations. HOLDC-B also points to the

“capability”, capacity, expertise and “maturity” for customisation within the organisation: “[..] so we have a constraint that we can only customise to the level of our resource capability and we want to keep that internal.” Coach3 similarly points to the limited capacity, expertise and resources to “design” within the Business Schools:

“Exactly [the lack of resources] and also they don’t have that creativity, they don’t have a design team. [..] So business schools typically outsourced the design of these high level programmes, [..] so Delta Business school [on the BankSeta IEDP “outsourced” to DBS] -- PM-DBS for instance is an outsourced and he’s paid for that and although that design has been agreed, that was a mutual design, but I worked recently on a big project with First Rand on their leadership development [as faculty member of another Business School]. It was their next level of management, the next level of leaders and it was a joint decision and we had to get an external party to help us with the design. We didn’t do it as faculty.”

HOLDC-B is seeking to build and retain an internal capacity for customisation and designing more broadly. HOLDC-B also discusses the “partnering” with external service providers for customising and designing leadership development, as do the other HoLDCs. It is part of a broader theme of partnering and developing relationships with internal and external stakeholders that emerges in the discussions on the differentiation of “customising” or “customisation” in the subsection below:

“So I guess there’s a lot business schools can do but they need to get closer to business I believe. I’ve seen with some of the business schools that I work with that really build a relationship with us. They really try and understand what we grappling with from a business point of view are more successful. Because they’re not trying to give you the stock standard things that they give every other bank. They try and separate you from other banks or other organisations and say this is a solution for you specifically. But I’m not saying they won’t use that somewhere else cause they will. But it is to sort of say how do we customise more and meet the demands of that business where they are at.” (HOLDC-A)

“So I’ve got a very good relationship with her [a person from an institution [from “the other company that I’ve liaised with” for skills development]. [..] Very important, because she customises things. She gives us great ideas. I believe in sharing and getting -- because everybody contributes something different because you think differently. So I like to discuss.” (HOLDC-D2) (italics and underlining added)

However, HOLDC-A cautions on the focus, perspective or “point of view” from which “customising” or “customisation” are undertaken: “So we can talk about customisation and all of that and it is not where the organisation is at, it can be a mismatch then, a misalignment.” In the above quoted excerpt, for example, HOLDC-A suggests that the Business Schools “need to get closer to business”,

“really build a relationship” and “understand what we are grappling with from a business point of view”. However, if one considers the “point of view” of the

Business School faculty this may be seen as “problem solving” (Past-PM-DBS and HOLDC-DBS) operational issues or being “results”-focused (Past-PM-DBS) rather than facilitating the disciplinary and thematic “learning”, “reflection”, and

“personal development” of the individual delegates. At the same time the Delta Business School faculty also see the “need to get closer to business” as an

“personal development” of the individual delegates. At the same time the Delta Business School faculty also see the “need to get closer to business” as an