The Sat-Nav Trap: Why Convenience Might Be Killing Capability
A conversation with with Nick Shackleton-Jones
I recently had the absolute pleasure of welcoming Nick Shackleton-Jones to the Level Up Leadership podcast. If you work in Learning and Development, you will likely know the name. If you do not, you certainly should. Nick is a true pioneer who challenges the status quo with a blend of intellect, humour, and deeply human insight.
Our conversation sparked a real moment of reflection for me. We explored the tension between efficiency and growth, the future of AI in our teams, and why so many organisations get ‘development’ completely wrong.
I left the recording buzzing with ideas. I want to share three specific concepts from our chat that I believe are vital for any leader navigating this tech-integrated world.
The Parenting Trap
One of the most striking points Nick made was about the default setting for new leaders. We often assume that poor leadership comes from a place of malice or incompetence. Nick argues that it actually comes from a lack of reference points.
When an individual contributor is promoted because they are good at their technical job, they often have no model for leadership other than their own parents. They default to ‘parenting’ their team. They tell people what to do. They tell people off. They treat grown professionals like children.
This creates a culture of dependency. The leader feels important because everyone comes to them for answers. The team feels stifled.
In my book, Enhanced Leadership, I talk about the transition from ‘doing’ to ‘enabling’. I write:
“This is often the hardest transition, letting go of the work that actually got you promoted to instead help others deliver it.”
Nick’s insight reinforces this. To escape the parenting trap, we must move away from control and towards connection. We need to know our people as individuals. We must understand their motivations, their preferred communication styles, and what challenges they actually need to grow.
The Sat-Nav Effect
This was my favourite analogy from the episode. Nick compared modern performance support to a Sat-Nav.
In the past, London taxi drivers had to learn ‘The Knowledge’. They had to map the streets in their heads. This built deep capability. Today, an Uber driver uses an app. The app tells them to turn left, then turn right. The performance is immediate and efficient. The driver gets you to your destination just as well as the expert.
However, the driver has not learned the route. If the battery dies, they are lost.
This is the ‘Sat-Nav Effect’. We can use tools, resources, and AI to give our teams immediate performance support. We can give them a checklist that ensures they do the job perfectly today. But are we building the capability they need for tomorrow?
There is a trade-off between performance and learning. Constant reliance on tools erodes our ability to think for ourselves. As leaders, we must decide when to give our team a Sat-Nav and when to force them to read the map.
The Apprentice Gap
This leads directly to a concept I am becoming increasingly obsessed with: the Apprentice Gap.
During the podcast, I shared a memory of my early career. I spent weeks cutting screenshots and pasting them into wireframes. It was dull work. It was ‘graft’. AI could do it in seconds today. Yet that graft taught me how the systems worked. It was my training ground.
If we automate all the low-value tasks, how do junior staff learn the ropes?
I address this challenge explicitly in Enhanced Leadership. In Chapter 13, I state:
“If we automate the ladder that we climbed up, we have a responsibility to build a lift for those coming up behind us.”
Nick shared a brilliant example of how we can solve this. He worked with an organisation where they didn’t just automate the work; they used AI to create more challenge. They built an AI character called ‘Evil Eva’ to act as a judge and competitor in training scenarios.
This is the bionic approach. We should not just use AI to make life easier. We should use it to make learning richer, harder, and more immersive.
Takeaways for Leaders
If you lead a team, I want you to audit your current approach to development.
Are you relying on generic course catalogues? Nick was very clear that ‘development’ is rarely about sitting in a classroom. It is about experiences. It is about challenges.
Look at your team members. Who is cruising with the Sat-Nav on? Who needs to be thrown into a new environment to build their map-reading skills?
You must create mobility. Large organisations often hoard talent in silos. Be the leader who encourages your people to move, to swap roles, and to take on assignments that scare them slightly. That is where the growth happens.
Takeaways for Coaches
For my fellow coaches, there is a huge opportunity here.
We need to help leaders navigate the “human in the loop” transition. In Enhanced Leadership, I argue that we must define clear zones:
Human-Only: For high-stakes emotional judgement.
AI-Assisted: Where we use the tool as a co-pilot.
Automated: Where we let the machine do the grunt work.
Your coaching conversations should help leaders identify these boundaries. Challenge them to see where they are hiding behind ‘graft’ that should be automated. Equally, challenge them to identify where they are abdicating human responsibility to a machine.
Use Nick’s ‘Sat-Nav’ analogy in your sessions. Ask your clients: “Are you teaching your team to drive, or are you just telling them where to turn?”
Conclusion
The future of work is not about choosing between humans and machines. It is about integrating them intelligently.
We need to be ‘bionic’. We need to use technology to remove the drudgery, but we must also protect the friction that leads to learning. We must stop parenting our teams and start challenging them.
If you enjoyed these insights, I highly recommend you listen to the full episode with Nick. His thinking on ‘resources not courses’ is a game-changer.
Spotify - YouTube - Apple Music