From Capability to Performance: Learning How to Evolve
by Eleanor Ng
Last updated on 29 October 2026
Public service performance is shaped not only by what officers know or can do, but also whether these are reinforced in an organisation’s actual workflows, decision-making and operating culture. This insight is driving new performance-led learning and development strategies at the Civil Service College (CSC).
Where Capability Breaks Down in Practice
The paper comes back in a sea of red, covered in comments. The recommendations are unclear and do not force meaningful choices because key trade-offs have not been clearly laid out. Important stakeholders’ concerns appear late, if at all. After several rounds of revisions, a familiar diagnosis emerges – “our officers need better policy writing skills”.
A paper or submission is often only the point at which upstream issues become visible. The real difficulties may have started much earlier – how the problem statement was framed, which assumptions went untested, or what trade-offs were left unresolved. By the time these weaknesses surface in a draft, they may appear as a technical or skill gap, even though their origins lie elsewhere.
Once a problem is interpreted as a writing skill gap, a writing intervention naturally follows. These interventions can be useful, but they occur late in the process where choices and critical thinking possibilities are already constrained.
This pattern is not unique to policy work. Across the Public Service, many challenges now cut across organisational boundaries. Decisions in one domain have implications in another, and outcomes depend on how well different parts of the system work together. Even when officers are capable and committed, results hinge on whether teams and organisations can adapt everyday practices, exercise judgement in new circumstances, and translate intent into sustained action. We end up intervening at the point where problems become visible, rather than addressing the organisational conditions that gave rise to those problems.
In such contexts, the point at which learning enters the work matters as much as what is learnt. The issue is not whether learning has taken place, but whether learning takes place early enough in the workflow to reshape habits, routines, and expectations.
“The issue is not whether learning has taken place, but whether learning takes place early enough in the workflow to reshape habits, routines, and expectations.”
This is why learning deserves renewed attention — not merely as training, but as a strategic capability that helps the Public Service build the capacity to evolve and perform under changing conditions.
A Ground Reality: Why Organisations Default to Training
When organisations face a pressing challenge, there is often pressure to respond quickly and visibly. A training programme is tangible, familiar and executable. It signals that something is being done.
This illustrates a broader organisational tendency. When a learning and development (L&D) team is engaged mainly at the point of training delivery, it has fewer opportunities to influence how the problem is framed in the first place. This reinforces the perception that its role is programme provision, rather than helping the organisation understand what is getting in the way of performance.
These tendencies are not accidental. They are shaped by how responsibility, authority and expertise are organised within agencies.
Why L&D Functions Get Pulled Downstream
In many Singapore Public Service agencies, L&D functions are small teams located within HR, responsible for helping their agencies build the knowledge, skills and capabilities needed to deliver their mission. Some agencies may also have dedicated academies or Public Sector Training Institutes where professional, technical or operational training requirements are substantial.
Much of their work centres on training administration, course design and delivery, learning systems management, onboarding and professional development programmes. While more L&D teams are also supporting capability planning, workplace learning and organisational performance outcomes, these demands can leave limited room for diagnosis, experimentation or engagement with organisational priorities.
What happens within Public Service agencies mirrors how they currently engage CSC. We are asked to enter the picture downstream, when the diagnosis of the organisation’s learning needs has been settled: a course is requested, and the job is just to deliver it well. This reinforces CSC’s perceived role as a training provider and narrows the space for us to enquire about what is actually constraining performance.
CSC’s annual customer satisfaction survey shows that agencies continue to expect greater timeliness from us in addressing capability development needs. This expectation is largely anchored on the provision of training solutions. Responding faster to already defined learning needs can only take us so far. The shift requires CSC to engage earlier. More importantly, it requires us to change the questions we ask.
If the issues lie upstream, our starting points should be the organisational challenges and priorities that agencies are facing, and whether there is a capability or learning angle to the performance issue. We must move upstream to support agencies while they are still diagnosing the problem, so that we can help shape the conditions for improving performance, rather than be only engaged downstream as a training provider.
What Needs to Shift: Start with What Is Preventing Good Performance
A performance-led approach begins with the question: “What is preventing good performance from occurring?”
Sometimes the answer will be capability: officers may need new knowledge, sharper skills or more structured practice in a particular area. But the main constraints to performance often lie not in capability but in unclear roles, limited authority, weak reinforcement, conflicting priorities, workflow design, or the absence of opportunities to apply what has been learned.
In CSC’s experience, programme quality alone does not explain whether learning translates into improved performance. Most of our programmes receive strong participant feedback and are highly rated by learners, yet the intended changes in workplace practice do not always materialise. This is an experience the learners often reflect to us when they express sentiments like “my manager needs to learn this too”.
The factors that determine whether learning is transferred and applied to the workplace lie beyond the classroom. Are managers reinforcing new behaviours? Do officers have opportunities to apply what they have learnt? Are workflows supporting different ways of working. Is there sufficient space for reflection and feedback? Such questions have led CSC to pay closer attention not only to designing meaningful learning experiences, but also to understanding the workplace conditions that enable learning to take root.
What This Means in Practice
Performance-led L&D starts with what needs to improve in the ways of working, then considers how learning, workplace conditions and evidence can work together to enable that change. It recognises that learning is not only about what officers know and can do, but also how they exercise judgement when applying that capability in changing circumstances. It changes how L&D functions approach performance challenges in three ways:
L&D enters while the problem is still being framed. Rather than starting with a request for training, it helps organisations clarify the outcomes they are seeking and understand what is producing the current performance challenge. The focus shifts from specifying an intervention to diagnosing what is getting in the way of performance.
L&D designs capability development and workplace conditions as one integrated response. Knowledge and skills matter, but so do the expectations, workflows and reinforcement mechanisms that enable new behaviours to take root. Instead of treating learning and application as separate stages, the design considers from the outset how learning will be supported and used in practice.
L&D uses evidence to adapt the response as practice changes. The focus moves beyond programme completion and participant reactions towards understanding whether different ways of working are being adopted and sustained. Evidence from workplace practice helps organisations understand what is reinforcing change, where application is being blocked, and what may need to be adjusted, strengthened or stopped as implementation unfolds.
Looking Beyond the Training Request
Leadership development is a priority for many Public Service agencies, and one concern is that managers need to have better feedback conversations.
Say an agency approaches CSC for a workshop on giving effective feedback.
A performance-led approach begins with inquiry rather than immediately asking for details to deliver a programme. Why are feedback conversations not happening? What is preventing managers from holding timely and constructive feedback conversations?
By looking at the conditions around the presenting problem, the diagnosis may shift. We may discover that some managers need greater skill or confidence. It may show that operational demands are causing managers to deprioritise feedback conversations. Organisational expectations about regular feedback may also be unclear, and difficult conversations may be avoided because there is little support from senior leaders. What appears to be a capability gap may in fact be a broader workplace issue.
Depending on the diagnosis, the response might combine training with clearer managerial expectations and accountability, regular check-in routines and prompts for performance conversations, and peer support and follow-through mechanisms that reinforce application in the workplace.
L&D does not have leverage over every condition that influences performance. Line managers, HR partners and organisational decision-makers all play critical roles in setting expectations, allocating attention and reinforcing desired behaviours. L&D’s contribution is to bring evidence, inquiry and learning expertise to the table, helping organisations understand what is happening in practice, what may be getting in the way of performance, and whether changes are taking root over time.
“We must move upstream to support agencies while they are still diagnosing the problem, so that we can help shape the conditions for improving performance.”
Learning How to Evolve
For 25 years, CSC’s purpose has been to support a capable Public Service in serving Singapore. That purpose remains unchanged. What has evolved is how capability needs to be built, applied and sustained as the work of government becomes more complex.
Transformation requires more than new activities or capabilities. It demands that organisations examine the assumptions that shape how they understand problems, what options they see, and what they consider possible. This is why transformation involves learning, unlearning and relearning at the same time — retaining strengths that continue to serve, while questioning and abandoning assumptions that no longer fit changing circumstances.
At CSC, we have been relearning what it takes for capability to translate into performance. Designing high quality and impactful learning experiences remains important. But programme quality alone does not determine whether learning changes how work is done. Learning creates value not when the individual leaves with new knowledge but when that learning shapes judgement and influences decision-making over time. Hence, we are now paying greater attention to learning transfer and the conditions in the organisation that shape opportunity to apply learning.
The harder part of transformation may be not what CSC needs to learn next, but what we need to unlearn. We need to look at the assumptions that have grown around how we create value, where our influence begins and ends, and how we deploy our expertise.
One is where we locate our impact. CSC has long recognised that training alone is insufficient, and successive generations of officers have sought to move beyond programme delivery towards broader forms of partnership and value creation. Yet our systems, measures and ways of working may still draw our attention towards what we can most readily see and deliver: the quality of programmes and learning experiences. Performance-led L&D asks us to extend that view of impact — from the quality of what we provide to what changes in practice through the work we do with agencies.
“We need to move from organising problems around our domains of expertise to organising our expertise around the problem.”
A second is how we think about the boundaries of our influence. Many of the conditions that shape performance sit outside CSC’s direct control. Managers, agency leaders, HR partners and other organisational actors determine priorities, workflows, incentives and reinforcement. But the limits of our control need not define the boundaries of our contribution. CSC also has other sources of influence that matter, such as our ability to convene across the Public Service, our thought and practice leadership in areas that support Public Sector Transformation, and the implicit trust that agencies place in us – something we must not take for granted.
These create opportunities to shape conversations, connect perspectives, surface emerging practices and influence how problems are understood before solutions are fixed. Addressing performance challenges may require CSC to work more deliberately through different forms of influence, alongside a wider set of relationships and levers — including agency leadership, Centre of Government agencies and, where relevant, policy and system mechanisms — to create the conditions in which learning can have greater effect.
A third is our relationship with expertise. CSC has built deep capabilities in areas such as learning design and development, leadership development and organisation development. But real performance challenges do not necessarily fall neatly within these domains. We need to move from organising problems around our domains of expertise to organising our expertise around the problem. This means working with more interdisciplinarity, and using expertise not only to provide solutions, but also to help agencies inquire, diagnose, make sense of complexity, test assumptions and learn from what happens in practice.
Seen this way, CSC’s evolution is itself an example of the capacity we hope to strengthen across the Public Service. Evolvability is not simply the ability to learn more. It is the ability to discern what should be retained, what may need to be unlearned, and how existing strengths can be relearned and recombined as circumstances change. To be performance-led is not to focus on performance alone, but to take responsibility for how learning, judgement and everyday work combine to produce results over time.
Many of the challenges facing the Public Service are not resolved when strategy is formulated, policy is announced or technology is introduced. They are solved, or not solved, in the translation of intent into practice. That translation depends on the judgement exercised by officers, teams and leaders as they navigate trade-offs and adapt to circumstances that cannot be fully anticipated in advance. Helping individuals, teams and institutions to learn and adapt in that translation is therefore an increasingly important part of how the Public Service renews itself.
CSC's role cannot begin and end with training. We need to work more closely with agencies, Public Sector Training Institutes and organisational stakeholders to understand performance challenges, strengthen the conditions that support change, and learn alongside agencies as new ways of working take root. This requires CSC to contribute not only to capability development, but also to the inquiry, experimentation and organisational learning that accompany transformation.
“Learning creates value not when the individual leaves with new knowledge but when that learning shapes judgement and influences decision-making over time.”
CSC plays an institutional role in the Public Service. Part of that role is helping to strengthen the judgement, stewardship and values that guide action in complex and changing circumstances. By connecting experiences across agencies, surfacing emerging practices and supporting collective learning, CSC helps build capabilities that endure beyond any single programme, intervention or organisation. In this way, the Public Service strengthens not only its ability to perform today, but also its capacity to adapt, renew and serve Singapore well over time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eleanor Ng is Chief Learning & Development Officer at the Civil Service College. She has close to 25 years of experience in leadership development and talent management in the Singapore Public Service. Her work explores how learning, unlearning and organisational adaptation can strengthen performance in a rapidly changing environment. She currently leads efforts to advance a performance-led approach to capability development across the Singapore Public Service.