Creating and Managing Development Programs

A program in HABICUB is not a course with a syllabus. It is a per-person plan that compiles into a dated sequence of small actions, and most of the quality comes from decisions you make before you press Activate.

This guide covers those decisions, then what to do once it is running.

What gets compiled

A Development Plan holds one to three competencies for one person. Each competency contributes Development Goals, and each goal its Development Tasks. When you activate the plan, HABICUB compiles all of that into a single Development Journey: fifteen MDAs, ordered and dated.

The important property: it is one sequence, not one per competency. Competency is context on each action. A person working on two competencies does not run two parallel tracks — they get one list, interleaved, in a phase-sensible order.

Choosing competencies

One to three. The fifteen actions are shared across whatever you choose, so three competencies means roughly five actions each. That is already near the floor of what changes a behavior. Four would be theatre.

If a person genuinely needs four, run them sequentially across two plans rather than diluting one.

Choose for the job, not the gap list. An assessment will hand you a ranked list of weaknesses. The useful question is narrower: which one of these, if it improved, would most change this person’s next quarter? Development capacity is the scarce resource, not diagnosis.

Writing Development Goals

A goal is an outcome, not an activity.

• Activity: “attend feedback training.”
• Outcome: “direct reports can describe, unprompted, what they should do differently after a one-to-one.”

Two observers should be able to agree on whether the goal has been reached. If they cannot, it is not a goal yet — it is a theme.

Selecting Development Tasks

Tasks are where you control relevance. They decide which MDAs the compiler has to draw from, so a task list that is too narrow produces repetitive actions and one that is too broad produces scattered ones.

A useful test: read the task list as a stranger and ask whether it describes this person’s actual job. “Run a weekly planning meeting” is a task a manager recognises. “Improve communication” is not.

The schedule

The plan has a fixed start date and a projected end simulated from what is left. There is no fixed duration and no stored future dates, which has two consequences worth understanding:

• An absence rewrites nothing. Register leave and the remaining actions simply schedule around it. The projected end moves; nothing is lost or duplicated.
• The end date is a projection, not a commitment. Do not put it in a contract.

Absence is self-service for participants and takes effect immediately — there is no approval step, because a person who is on leave is on leave whether or not a program manager has clicked something.

Phases

Actions are ordered across five phases: Awareness, Deliberate Choice, Guided Practice, Habit Formation, Behaviour Integration. The phase is authored on each MDA, not derived from its position, so re-ordering the library never silently re-phases anything.

Phase admission happens per slot, which stops a pre-planned sequence front-loading all the easy awareness actions into week one.

Activation

Activation is a single atomic step: compile, persist, activate. A program manager never assembles a journey by hand.

Once activated, a journey is not recomputed. If the underlying library changes tomorrow, the people already running keep the sequence they were given. This is deliberate — a development plan that quietly rewrites itself mid-flight is not a plan.

Once it is live

The four counters

Received, opened, answered, assessed. Read them as a funnel:

• Received → opened is a delivery and attention problem. Wrong channel, wrong time, or too many other notifications.
• Opened → answered is a relevance and effort problem. The action is too big, too vague, or does not match the person’s real work.
• Answered → assessed is a you problem. It means mentors are not keeping up, and it is the one that quietly kills a program: people stop answering when nobody answers back.

The two progress axes

Progress and phase legitimately disagree, and HABICUB never collapses them:

• Progress = answered out of total. What the person has done.
• Phase = where the schedule has reached.

Someone in Guided Practice at 40% progress is not a contradiction. It means the calendar moved and they did not — exactly the case a mentor should see, and exactly what a single blended percentage would have hidden.

Pausing

You can pause a whole plan or a single competency. A paused competency is stepped over — the plan’s other competencies keep delivering. Use this when someone changes role mid-program and one of their competencies stops being relevant; there is no need to tear the plan down.

Common failure modes

Too many competencies. Covered above. The most common and the most damaging.

Goals that are themes. If you cannot tell whether it has been achieved, neither can the participant.

No mentor capacity. A program with more participants than a mentor can review is a program that will produce a good funnel for three weeks and then collapse at the assessed step. Count mentor hours before you count participants.

Judging it on completion. See Completion Is Not Change.

Next

• Driving Engagement at Scale
• From Feedback to Development