Building the Foundations - From Four People and a Blank Page to a Global Learning Organization - Part 2

In Part 1 (read here), I shared how four of us started with a blank page and gradually built 13 chapters of operating procedures covering everything from Operations and IT to HR, Finance, governance and quality.

What began as a question of “Do we really need all this?” slowly became something much more meaningful. The process forced us to look closely at how we worked, challenge what we were doing and, in many ways, design the business as we were building it.

By the end, I had stopped seeing the SOPs as documents we simply needed to create. They had become part of the infrastructure we were building. What I didn't know then was that we were not simply documenting a business. We were creating the foundations for something that would eventually be measured, tested and held to a much higher standard.

Sit back, get settled, and perhaps grab a coffee or tea. This one's going to be a bit of a longer read, so let's make a moment of it! 😊

Part 2 — Inside the Lines
How Quality Standards Gave Us Room to Grow

There is an analogy I often think about when I look back at that period. As children, many of us were taught to colour inside the lines. The lines gave us a boundary. They told us where the picture began and ended. Within those boundaries, we could still choose our colours, experiment with combinations and make the picture our own.

I think a good quality standard works in much the same way. It gives an organization its lines.

Those lines are not necessarily there to restrict creativity or tell everyone exactly how to do every single thing. They provide a framework within which people can operate with greater consistency, clarity and confidence.

That distinction became particularly important as our remit grew.

Without some boundaries, every person can interpret a process differently. Every team can develop its own version of what “good” looks like. What starts as flexibility can eventually become inconsistency. The SOPs gave us our lines. They created a common understanding of how the business should operate, while still allowing us to improve, adapt and innovate within that framework.

And that is where I came to appreciate the value of quality standards.

At first glance, standards can feel restrictive. There can be a temptation to think that having a defined process means losing the freedom to do things differently.

In reality, the right framework can create freedom.

When the fundamentals are clear, people don't have to reinvent them every time. They know what needs to happen, who is responsible, what quality looks like and where the boundaries are. That gives them more space to focus their energy on solving problems, improving the experience and finding better ways of working.

The lines don't stop you from creating. They give you a canvas on which to create.

The Academy grew, and so did the lines

One of the biggest lessons I learned was that operating procedures cannot remain static, especially when the remit of the business you are supporting continues to grow. And our remit grew considerably!

What started as a small learning function gradually began supporting more employees, more parts of the Group and a much broader portfolio of learning needs. New programmes were introduced, new audiences came on board and the ways in which we delivered and managed learning became increasingly diverse. With that growth came greater operational complexity.

We initially relied heavily on analogue and manual ways of working. As the Academy expanded, technology became increasingly embedded in our operations. Manual processes moved into digital systems. Tracking became automated. Platforms became an important part of how we managed learning, learners, data and administration.

The SOPs had to evolve alongside that transformation.

Some processes were refined. Others were completely rewritten. Some became irrelevant and were removed, while new processes had to be introduced to reflect the way the business now operated. Eventually, the conversation moved into another phase as AI began influencing business processes.

That introduced a different kind of change. It was not simply about adding another technology to an existing workflow. In many cases, it meant reconsidering the workflow itself.

Processes that had been designed for people to complete manually could now be supported by automation and AI. That brought new considerations around quality, governance, accountability and human judgement.

The operating model therefore continued to evolve from analogue, to digital and increasingly towards AI enabled ways of working. Let me be clear… AI did not replace anyone! The team simply incorporated it into their workflows to optimize and design more efficient ways of achieving the desired outcomes.

The lines had to move with us. That is another important lesson about standards. A quality framework should create consistency without creating stagnation. The purpose is not to preserve yesterday's way of working forever. The purpose is to create enough structure to ensure quality while allowing the organization to evolve.

Our documents therefore continued to be refined, reshaped and restructured as the business matured.

A process that made perfect sense when we were a small team could become inefficient as the organization scaled. A manual process that once worked well could become unnecessary once technology was introduced. And a digital process might need to be reconsidered again when AI changed what was possible.

The standard was not the enemy of change. It became the framework through which we could manage change more deliberately.

When the documents became evidence

By the time I had assumed ownership of the business, the SOPs had taken on an importance that we could not have fully anticipated in those early days. They were no longer simply internal reference documents. They had become part of the organization's governance and quality framework.

Our processes were reviewed through internal audit and external audit processes. What we had documented was examined against how we actually operated, and those reviews gave us another opportunity to identify gaps, improve processes and strengthen the organization.

Eventually, the Academy achieved certification against ISO 21001:2018, the international standard for educational organizations and learning services. More recently, we upgraded to ISO 21001:2025, the latest version of the standard.

For me, the most meaningful part of that journey was never the certificate itself. The certificate was the outcome. The real value was in everything that had happened before it: the years of documenting, reviewing, refining, testing, correcting and improving the way we worked.

The irony was that the more disciplined we became about our processes, the more freedom we created to grow, adapt and improve. But the real test of all those foundations wasn't going to be another audit, another procedure or another certificate.

It was what they enabled us to become.

And that, as it turned out, was the part we never saw coming.