Yesterday I listed a few reasons why performance slips that have nothing to do with skill. Time, clarity, process, tools, and mixed signals from above. All real and all ignored in favour of “send them on a course.”

Underneath all six is one question that decides everything else: can this person do the thing, or can they not get to it?

Those aren’t the same problem, and they don’t have the same fix.

Ability is a property of the person – skill or will. If either is missing, that’s a development question, and it’s got a decent evidence base behind it: deliberate practice, targeted coaching, and structured feedback. L&D owns this and generally knows how to work it.

Capacity is a property of the conditions: time, resources, authority, opportunity, and the actual space to perform. Someone can have the skill and the will and still fail, because the system won’t let them. No training can fix a caseload that prevents applying what has been learned. No coaching restores authority; a role was never actually given, whatever the job title says.

Two different problems with two different evidence bases, and – most tellingly – two different owners. Ability gaps respond to learning interventions while capacity gaps don’t respond to training at all. Capacity gaps respond to a redesigned workload, reallocated authority, or a structural change to what the role is actually permitted to do.

Get the diagnosis wrong and you get yesterday’s pattern exactly. Someone attends the course, demonstrates the skill in the room, goes back to the same conditions, and doesn’t perform. Everyone concludes the training didn’t stick; the training DID work, but the job still wasn’t doable.

I see this scenario constantly in workforce and management contexts. A newly promoted service lead who can’t delegate isn’t always short on leadership skill. Often they’re short on the authority the new title was supposed to carry or the time their existing caseload leaves for anything beyond firefighting. Put them through a leadership programme, and you’ve spent budget on a problem they didn’t have while the real one remains untouched.

Before you commission anything, which one is it, and what’s your evidence?