Turtles all the way down.
There is an old story about a lecturer who is told the world rests on the back of a giant turtle. And what does the turtle stand on? Another turtle. And that one? "You're very clever, young man, but it's turtles all the way down."
Leadership development has the same problem.
A provider tells you their programme is accredited. Reassuring — someone has checked. So who checked? An awarding body. And who vouches for the awarding body? A regulator. And who appointed the regulator? And what, exactly, did any of them look at?
Follow the chain far enough and you find that at no point did anyone in it meet one of your managers.
This is not a swipe at ILM or CMI. They do a real job and they do it properly. But it is worth being precise about what that job is.
Accreditation verifies process. It confirms that a syllabus covers what it claims to cover, that assessment is consistent, that the paperwork is in order, that the same course delivered in Leeds and in Bristol is recognisably the same course. That is quality assurance, and quality assurance is worth having.
What it does not do — what it has never claimed to do — is tell you whether a single delegate came back and led differently.
Those are two completely different questions. The industry has spent thirty years letting the first one stand in for the second, because the first one is easy to evidence and the second one is hard.
Because everybody in the transaction gets something.
The provider gets a badge for the brochure. The buyer gets a defensible answer when someone asks how the budget was spent. The delegate gets a certificate. The awarding body gets a fee. Every party can point at a document.
And nobody has to answer the awkward question, which is whether anything changed.
We have heard this from enough people to stop treating it as anecdote. Managers who have been through formal programmes, who hold the qualification, who can produce the certificate — and who cannot tell you one thing they do differently as a result.
Abi Broadley, Managing Director of Aquarius, describes what that was like from the inside:
We've done ILM leadership training before. It was very theory based, the tutor knew the content of the course but wasn't particularly inspiring, in fact it was quite boring. There was loads of theory, we had to write a lot of essays, it was a massive amount of work and very few results. We learnt theories and models about leadership and management, which was good, but didn't really get any practical ways of solving the real problems that we were facing day-to-day. We came out with a certificate, which really didn't mean anything.
Read that last sentence again. We came out with a certificate, which really didn't mean anything. Everything the accreditation was designed to guarantee had been guaranteed. The syllabus was covered. The essays were marked. The standard was met. And the thing everyone actually wanted did not happen.
That is not a failure of the awarding body. The awarding body did its job. It is a failure of the question being asked.
The turtles stop when you ask a question that has a floor under it.
Not: is this course accredited? But: what does this manager do on Monday morning that they did not do on Friday?
That question is unpleasant because it can be answered wrongly. It can be answered by the person's team, who will know immediately. It cannot be satisfied with a document, and it does not care who signed the document.
It is also the only question that has ever mattered.
Ask a provider what changed for the last three organisations they worked with. Ask what the managers' own people noticed. Ask what happened six months later, when the room had gone cold and nobody was watching. If the answer comes back as a syllabus, a framework, or a logo, you have found another turtle.
We carry CPD accreditation ourselves. It is on our about page, and our free half-day seminar is worth four CPD hours. We are not pretending to stand outside any of this. But that badge is worth precisely what every other badge is worth: it confirms the hours were structured and the content was real. It says nothing whatsoever about whether your managers lead better afterwards.
We publish it because buyers ask for it. We would rather you ignored it and asked us the Monday morning question instead.