Nobody Practises

Every organisation says it's world-class. Almost none of them practise.

Not their sales teams. Not their managers. Not their frontline staff. Not the people responsible for the conversations that determine whether customers stay, employees trust the business, and regulators look the other way. Nobody practises. And the reason nobody practises is more uncomfortable than the fact itself.

They don't need to. The performance bar is so low that practice would be overkill.

This is the thing nobody in corporate learning wants to say plainly. Most organisations have not set a standard of conversational performance that would require anyone to rehearse anything. The expectation is not excellence. The expectation is adequacy. Get through the conversation. Don't say anything obviously wrong. Follow the script closely enough. Move on.

When the standard is "don't get us sued," practice is a luxury. When the standard is "complete the module," practice is irrelevant. When the standard is "handle it however you handle it and we'll intervene if something goes wrong," practice is pointless — because there's nothing specific to practise for.

This is what a low-performance culture actually looks like. Not people being lazy. Not people being careless. People operating rationally inside a system that has never asked them to be good at the thing that matters most.

Watch what happens in environments where the standard is genuinely high.

A professional football team trains five days a week. Not because the players lack talent — because the performance expectation demands it. Every touch, every pass, every movement is drilled until it becomes instinct. The gap between a Premier League side and a Sunday league team is not primarily talent. It is the volume and quality of structured practice that talent is built on.

I played Sunday league for years. I loved it. But let's be honest about what it actually is.

You get an email on Thursday asking who's available. Half the team confirms. A quarter don't reply. Two people drop out on Saturday night. Nobody has touched a ball all week. You turn up on Sunday morning, pull on a shirt that doesn't quite fit, and spend ninety minutes running around with varying degrees of commitment and talent.

There is no shape. No drilled patterns. No practised set pieces. Someone always wants to play striker who shouldn't be playing striker. The goalkeeper is someone's mate who said he'd fill in. And afterwards, everyone goes to the pub and talks about the match as if tactical decisions were made — rather than eleven people independently improvising for an hour and a half.

It is wonderful. It is community. It is fun.

Nobody would call it world-class.

And yet this is exactly how most large organisations prepare their people for the conversations that carry the highest consequences. No structured rehearsal. No drilled responses. No feedback loop. Everyone just turns up and wings it.

The Sunday league player who skies every free kick never improves — because nobody films it, reviews it, or asks them to take fifty in training until the technique changes. The manager who fumbles every difficult conversation never improves for exactly the same reason.

But here's the crucial difference. The Sunday league player knows they're an amateur. They're not pretending to be world-class. They're playing for fun, and the stakes match the preparation.

Corporate Britain doesn't have that honesty. It brands itself as world-class, hires for excellence, talks about high performance in every town hall — and then sets conversational standards so low that nobody needs to practise meeting them.

How did we end up here?

Partly through a category error the entire learning and development industry has been complicit in. Somewhere along the way, the corporate world confused content with practice. It decided that e-learning — passive consumption of information — was the same thing as the active, uncomfortable, repetitive rehearsal that actually builds skill.

It is not. It is not even close.

Watching Match of the Day is not training for the match. One is entertainment. The other is preparation. They are not on the same spectrum. They are different activities entirely.

But the confusion persists — because it protects a low-performance culture from having to confront itself.

If content counts as practice, then practice is easy. It can be clicked through in twenty minutes. It can be tracked on a spreadsheet. It can be reported to the board as "95% completion" — a number that sounds like readiness but measures nothing of the sort. Nobody has to be seen struggling. Nobody has to discover they're not as good as they thought. The system produces a comforting metric and everyone moves on.

Real practice is harder. It is uncomfortable. It requires people to perform under pressure and confront the gap between how good they think they are and how good they actually are.

That confrontation is precisely what most organisations have engineered out of their culture. Not deliberately. Just quietly. By never setting a standard that would make it necessary.

Here is what we have learned building AI-powered conversation simulations for some of the largest organisations in the UK.

Almost nobody takes practice seriously.

Not for their sales teams — who rehearse pitches in their heads but never against a buyer who pushes back. Not for their managers — who are expected to navigate grievances, performance conversations, and disclosures with no rehearsal whatsoever. Not for their procurement teams — who face bribery and corruption pressure with nothing but a policy document and good intentions. Not for their frontline staff — who meet vulnerable customers in crisis having never once practised what that conversation actually feels like.

The result is predictable. Conversations across corporate Britain are average at best. Not disastrous — average. Adequate. Passable. The kind of performance that doesn't trigger an investigation but doesn't build trust either. The kind that gets through the moment without making it better.

And average has a cost. It just doesn't show up on a dashboard. It shows up six months later as a customer who quietly left. A disclosure that was technically handled but emotionally botched. A negotiation where the margin evaporated because nobody had practised holding the line. A talented employee who stopped raising concerns because the last time they did, the response was competent but cold.

Average is invisible. Until it compounds. And then it's a tribunal, a lost account, a culture problem, a headline.

Now. The temptation at this point is obvious.

You can see it coming. The vendor pivot. "And that's why you need our AI-powered practice platform..."

I'm not going to do that. Because it would be dishonest.

There is a growing market of practice and roleplay tools — ours included. AI has made it possible, for the first time, to give every employee a realistic rehearsal partner on demand. The technology is genuinely transformative. I believe that deeply. I built a company around it.

But here is the thing nobody selling these tools will tell you.

If you do not have a high-performance culture, your practice tools will not work.

You will buy them. You will roll them out. You will get a burst of initial curiosity. And then usage will quietly collapse — because the organisational culture that accepted a twenty-minute e-learning module as sufficient preparation will treat a simulation tool exactly the same way. As a box to tick. An initiative to survive. Something to complete rather than something to commit to.

A practice tool inside a low-performance culture is like buying a Premier League training facility for a Sunday league team. The equipment is world-class. The standards aren't. Nobody will use it the way it was designed to be used — because nobody is being asked to perform at the level that would make it necessary.

Practice tools are an accelerant. They are not a spark. If there is no performance culture to accelerate, you are pouring fuel on cold ground.

So before you purchase Real Talk Studio — or any practice platform — ask yourself a harder question first.

Have you actually set a performance standard worth practising for?

If the answer is no, the tool won't save you. Start here instead.

Raise the standard before you raise the tools. Define what a good conversation actually looks like — specifically, behaviourally, in the moments that matter. Not "handle with empathy." What does empathy sound like in the first thirty seconds of a harassment disclosure? What does holding a negotiation position sound like when the buyer threatens to walk? Until you can describe the standard precisely, there is nothing to practise towards.

Make practice visible and expected, not optional and hidden. High-performance sports teams practise in the open. Everyone sees who is putting in the work. In most organisations, practice is private and voluntary — which means it doesn't happen. Build it into the rhythm of the working week. When a manager sees their peers rehearsing a difficult conversation, the social norm shifts. From "that's weird" to "that's how we operate."

Reward readiness, not just results. Most organisations only measure outcomes — the deal closed, the complaint resolved, the audit passed. They never ask how someone prepared. Start recognising the preparation, not just the performance. When someone who rehearsed handles a conversation well, make the connection explicit. When someone who didn't rehearse handles it badly, make that connection explicit too.

Create safety for failure in practice, so there is less failure in reality. People avoid practice because it reveals what they cannot do. In most corporate cultures, that feels career-threatening. High-performance cultures draw a hard line: failure in practice is learning. Failure in the real moment — when someone's career, safety, or trust is at stake — is what should be avoided. Flip the shame. It should be more embarrassing to wing a harassment disclosure than to stumble through a simulation of one.

Stop measuring completion. Start measuring competence. As long as the board sees "95% completed the module" and treats that as readiness, nothing changes. The metric is the problem. It tells you who showed up. It tells you nothing about who is ready. Change the question from "did they finish it?" to "can they do it?" — and the entire conversation about standards, investment, and accountability shifts.

Leaders go first. In every high-performance environment — elite sport, military, surgery — the people at the top practise harder than anyone else. In most organisations, senior leaders are the last people who would sit through a simulation. They are often the ones who need it most. If leadership treats practice as something for other people, the culture will never change.

Athletes practise because the standard demands it. Surgeons practise because the standard demands it. Pilots practise because the standard demands it.

In most businesses, the standard demands nothing. So nothing is what people do.

The professional world has an amateur's relationship with practice. Not because it lacks tools — there are more tools available now than ever before. But because it has never set the performance expectations that would make those tools essential.

Every organisation says it's world-class. The question is whether they've set standards that require anyone to actually practise being world-class. Or whether they're a Sunday league team with a Premier League badge — turning up on Sunday, winging it, and hoping for the best.

The question is not whether your people know what to do.

It is whether your culture has ever demanded that they get good at doing it.