Charles Jennings highlights the issue no training programme addresses: behavioural patterns inside teams that derail performance. He shows why Behavioural Risk should be on every L&D leader’s agenda, shifting focus from individual upskilling to interaction. Diagnose dynamics, track psychological safety and knowledge flow, and strengthen collective outcomes where strategy sticks.
Learning and development teams are stretched. Skills taxonomies and individualised learning pathways are growing more sophisticated. AI is seen by L&D leaders as both a challenge and an opportunity. And yet, there is still one consistent challenge of performance failures: missed targets, failed projects, and strategy that simply doesn’t embed.
If your organisation is investing heavily in individual development but still experiencing collective underperformance, it is time to ask an uncomfortable question: what if the problem isn’t what people know and the skills they have, but how they interact?
“Behavioural risk is increasingly recognised as one of the most critical challenges faced by L&D, HR, boards and regulators.”
Simon Keslake, founder of Behavioural Risk Intelligence
I have been researching this issue for several years and have reached two conclusions.
Firstly, that the team, not the individual, is the ‘atomic unit’ of value and productivity in organisations. Ask any senior manager. The team is also the atomic unit of development. Yet HR and L&D are almost exclusively focused on individual development. Little effort is placed on the importance of a well-balanced team and team dynamics.
Secondly, that the way individuals in teams interact is critical for success. This second issue is the domain of behavioural risk, specifically, Systemic Behavioural Risk (SBR): the organisational vulnerability that emerges not from individual skill and capability gaps, but from the collective dynamics of how teams communicate, collaborate, and make decisions together. It is largely invisible to traditional HR and L&D tools, and it may be the most significant untapped challenge in the field.
The skills obsession is leaving a blind spot
I have written at length about the ‘skills obsession’. There is no doubt L&D has invested significant energy in skills frameworks, competency mapping, and individual development plans. This work has some genuine value. But it is built on a foundational assumption that deserves scrutiny: that organisational performance is the sum of individual capability.
It isn’t. Performance is an emergent property of how people work together. A team of highly skilled individuals can fail badly due to groupthink, poor psychological safety, or communication that quietly breaks down across functions. These are not skill problems. They are systemic, behavioural ones, and no amount of individual training and development will fix them.
“Pit a good employee against a bad system, and the system will win most every time.”
Dr. Geary Rummler
The risk is not that skills development is wrong. It is that it can crowd out attention to the collective system. When an emerging or existing leader completes a leadership programme and returns to their team with entrenched interaction patterns, the system tends to win. The “bad system” remains unchanged.
What Behavioural Risk actually looks like
Systemic Behavioural Risk takes several forms that L&D professionals should be able to recognise:
- Uniformity risk
Teams that think alike and stop surfacing dissenting views. This creates blind spots in decision-making and reducing the organisation’s capacity to detect early warning signals - Interaction friction
Poor psychological safety, siloed knowledge, and low cross-functional trust that slow execution and erode the quality of collaboration - Interdependence risk
Critical knowledge or decision-making concentrated in a small number of individuals or connections, making the team fragile under pressure
None of these show up in a standard Training Needs Analysis. They are invisible to individual performance reviews. They surface only when it is too late, in a system or product failure, a strategic misstep, or an ethical lapse that seems to come from nowhere but was, in fact, a long time building.
The traditional L&D response of coaching the individual, running a leadership course, adding another module to the LMS, or developing another compliance course, treats the symptom, not the cause. This results in intervention at the wrong level of the system.
The shift L&D leaders need to make
Addressing Behavioural Risk requires a meaningful shift in how L&D leaders and their teams frame their work. To enable this shift, three re-orientations are essential:
- Move from the individual as the unit of development to the team as the unit of performance and value
This means designing interventions that target collective dynamics, not just individual capability. The question changes from “what does this person need to learn?” to “what does this team need to change about how it operates?” - Diagnose the system, not just the individual
Tools such as Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) can map informal knowledge flows and identify where silos, over-reliance, or communication gaps are creating structural risk. Collective intelligence research consistently shows that team performance is predicted less by individual talent than by the quality of interaction. L&D has a role to play in building these diagnostic capabilities or, at least, in ensuring they inform learning and performance design - Measure what matters at the system level
Completion rates, satisfaction scores, and post-course assessments will not tell you whether your interventions are reducing Behavioural Risk. L&D leaders need to work towards leading indicators of team health, including measures of psychological safety, knowledge flow, and interaction quality that connect directly to business outcomes. This is no different from good performance analysis using business metrics.
Actions L&D and Training Managers can take now
You do not need to overhaul your entire function to start addressing Behavioural Risk. There are four practical starting points worth considering:
- Audit your approach
Review your TNA or LNA process and ask honestly: does it surface team-level behavioural dynamics, or only individual skill gaps? If it is entirely focused on the individual, it is structurally blind to systemic risk - Pilot collective interventions
Design at least one intervention aimed at team interaction rather than individual upskilling. Examples are structured cross-functional discussion/dialogue sessions, mandatory sense-making forums, or collective psychological safety reviews. These treat culture as a measurable system, not an aspiration - Build the business case with data
Connect team behavioural health to business outcomes: execution failures, innovation drag, attrition clusters and so on. Build the case in the language of risk mitigation, not in the language of learning activity. This is how L&D earns proximity to strategic conversations - Partner differently
Work more closely with HR strategic partners and operational team leaders to identify high-risk teams, not just high-potential individuals. Behavioural Risk is not an L&D problem in isolation; it sits at the intersection of people strategy and organisational performance
Performance is collective
L&D has always been about helping people perform better. Behavioural Risk is a reminder that performance is rarely a solo act. It emerges from the quality of interaction, the health of the system, and the collective capacity of teams to adapt under pressure. I have been reminding L&D professionals for years that performance is dependent on the environment in which performers operate, and that a balanced team is one of the prime ‘environmental’ factors to get right. To ignore that is equivalent to a football manager putting the 10 best strikers and a goalkeeper on the pitch and not thinking about the balance needed to create a successful team.
The L&D leaders and training managers who will have the greatest strategic impact in the years ahead will not just be experts in learning design. They will be architects of the conditions in which people, together, can perform at their best.
Charles Jennings is Managing Director at Duntroon Consultants and Partner, Strategy and Performance at 70:20:10 Institute / Tulser Global
This article draws on concepts from the white paper, The Behavioural Architect: HR and The Power of Collective Dynamics, which explores Systemic Behavioural Risk and the emerging discipline of Systemic Behavioural Architecture in HR. Authors: Simon Keslake, Charles Jennings, Oliver Woodhead
