Fix the Conditions Before You Fix the People

Dustin Woods spent 25 years watching organisations try to fix people. Now, with Growth Edge, he fixes the conditions first.

SPOTLIGHTS & INTERVIEWS

Dustin Woods, Founder, Growth Edge, DUBAI UAE

10/7/20263 min read

What brought you into this work?

I studied natural sciences at Cambridge, specialising in zoology - not the usual route into HR. I often joke that I never changed fields. I just moved from studying social animals to working with them.

Zoology taught me something I've used ever since. When an animal does something that looks strange, you look at its environment before you look at the animal. Change the habitat and the behaviour adapts.

After 25 years in complex organisations across four continents, I kept seeing the same pattern.

What pattern?

A team or department isn't working well, and the organisation decides the people need fixing. Collaboration is poor, so we run a collaboration workshop. Sales are down, so we send people on a sales course. People come back energised, and a month later nothing has changed.

The training was usually fine. The problem was waiting for them back at their desks: targets that reward individual results, confusion over who decides what, a climate where speaking up feels risky, so people say what's safe, not what's true. Put any of us into those conditions and predictable patterns of behaviour show up.

So my rule is simple: fix the conditions first, not the people.

Is any of this different in the Middle East?

A scene I've seen more than once: mid-session at an executive offsite, the VP's phone rings and he's out of the door in a second. The room waits for him to come back. I ask if he can turn it off. "No - they expect me to answer straight away." Nobody finds it strange. A call from above outranks a roomful of senior colleagues.

Where hierarchy is strong, it brings speed and clarity, but also a lot of waiting - for permission, for the most senior person to speak. A workshop won't change that. People step up when they know the person above them will back them, even if it goes wrong.

What will AI change?

In the age of AI, content is a commodity. What happens between people isn't.

AI can explain how to give feedback or delegate effectively in seconds. But it can't read the room. It won't notice someone lean back when the CEO starts talking, or a laugh that comes a fraction too fast. It doesn't know that two people at the table fell out over a reorganisation three years ago.

For L&D, that changes the job: less time delivering content, more time in the room with real teams.

One piece of advice for HR and L&D leaders?

Next time a leader asks you to fix their people, ask three questions before you agree. What exactly are people doing that worries you? Why might that behaviour make sense from where they sit? And if they changed tomorrow, what around them would drag them back to old habits?

Sometimes the answer is still training. More often the problem sits around the people, not in them. And sometimes the change needs to start with whoever asked for the fix.

What are you working on that excites you?

An idea I call "the team is the cohort". Most leadership development puts people in a cohort from across the organisation, but they don't do their work in that cohort - they go back to their teams. So I work with the team itself, on shared challenges, and they leave with actions to apply to real business problems the next morning.

And outside work?

I play the trombone, and I'm a dad to twins. The trombone is quieter.

About the author

Dustin Woods is the founder of Growth Edge, a Dubai-based practice that helps leadership teams fix the conditions that hold good people back. He has 25 years' experience in leadership, talent and organisational development across the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Australia, most recently as Director of Talent at Chalhoub Group.

growth-edge.co | linkedin.com/in/dustinwoods

Dustin's Profile; https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustinwoods

https://growth-edge.co