You're delivering good work. You're not shaping it.
Above the Work is the book for L&D professionals who are done being the person who builds what someone else decided.
Here's the pattern.
You ran the kickoff. The direction seemed clear. You did the design work, the build work, the review cycles. You hit the dates. The course launched, the deck got delivered, the program rolled out.
And then nothing really changed.
Not because the work was bad. The work was good. You can defend every decision in it. But somewhere between the kickoff and the launch, the project stopped being about the problem and started being about the deliverable. By the time anyone noticed, it was too late to fix.
You've had this conversation with yourself more than once.
The reason it keeps happening is not your craft. Your craft is fine. The reason is that nobody trained you for the layer of work that sits above the craft — the layer where direction gets set, decisions get shaped, and your real influence either lands or doesn't.
That layer has a name. This book is about how to work in it.
What's inside
A direct framework built from 25 years of doing this work inside real organizations. Four Driving Forces, twenty Guiding Principles, and the specific situations each one is built for. No theory you can't use on Monday.
CLARITY — Setting direction before effort accelerates
- Clarity Creates Speed
- Learn to Appreciate a No
- Define Before You Begin
- Know Your Bias Before You Begin
- Focus on What You Need to Fix
COURAGE — Saying the hard things and staying trusted
- Admit What You Don't Know
- Make Peace with Being Misunderstood
- Stand Firm When It Matters
- Take Risks That Move the Work Forward
- Let Go of What's No Longer Working
COLLABORATION — Becoming someone people shape work with
- Start Together
- Listen to Understand, Not to Respond
- Manage Conflict with Curiosity
- Build on Ideas, Not Against Them
- Communicate Progress, Not Perfection
MOMENTUM — Finishing in a way that earns you the next invitation
- Have a Bias for Completion
- Small Steps Make Real Progress
- Protect the Pace, Not the Plan
- Make Review a Habit, Not a Reaction
- Celebrate Progress, Not Effort
Each principle gets the situation where you'll feel it, a real story from the field, and one action you can take before you close the book.
Who this is for
You've been doing L&D for somewhere between three and fifteen years. You're capable. You deliver. The compliments you get are almost always about how fast you respond and how reliably you ship.
You've started noticing that the questions you get asked are about timing, not direction. About when, not what. You're in the room, but you're not in the conversation that decided what the room was for.
If that's where you are, this is the book that names what you've been feeling and gives you the practice to change it.
What This Book Is Not
Not a new instructional design methodology. Not a tool comparison. Not a take on AI in L&D. Your craft is not the problem this book solves.
If you're looking for any of those, there are good books for them. This is not one.
About Dr. Richard Sites
Richard Sites, Ed.D. — 25 years inside the work. Not the theory, not the templates. The work where deadlines slip, SMEs disappear, and training gets blamed for problems it was never meant to solve.
Co-author of Leaving ADDIE for SAM with Michael Allen, the book that reshaped how the field thinks about iterative design. Author of Uptrain, written for the executives who fund L&D. Author of Fix the Work, written for the teams doing it. Creator of the LinkedIn Learning course Agile Instructional Design. Founder of Peripet Learning.
Above the Work is the book that completes the arc.
SAM was about process. Uptrain was about the executive view. Fix the Work was about operational performance. Above the Work is about you — the person doing the work, and the gap between what you deliver and what you actually influence.
After the Book
Most readers finish Above the Work and want to put one of the forces into practice the same week. The book closes with a four-week starting plan that helps you do that.
When you're ready to go further, the Above the Work Accelerator is the structured course version — full modules on every principle, the Practice Companion workbook, and direct guidance from me. The book is the doorway. The Accelerator is the practice.