In the last week, I’ve had lots (more then ten) conversations with people about their professional practice. People inside and outside my organisation and nothing which could be defined as remedial or performance related; these were conversations about creativity, growth and moving to become engineers.

One person wanted to talk to me early in their career to avoid picking up ‘bad habits’. As I said then, they’re only bad habits if you recognise what you’re doing is harmful, and you don’t change it.

It was much more important to speak with them to learn from their enthusiasm, curiosity and creativity. Learning is an exchange and everyone contributing has value. We forget that too often when we’re tasked with ‘managing learning’.