Inside L&D Leaders Community: The sharpest insights from 2026 so far

This spring, something shifted

We spend a lot of time designing learning for individuals. And then we wonder why organizations do not change.

This spring, 200+ L&D leaders, organizational development professionals, and HR leaders came together in the Howspace community to work through that tension out loud, with peers carrying the same pressures. Not to watch presentations, but to think together. At one point, a leader described redesigning a leadership program by removing all the content from it entirely. No slides, no frameworks, no models. The room went quiet, and then the real conversation started.

What the community discovered

L&D has been solving a problem that was never really theirs to own

As AI makes content creation frictionless, decentralized teams are bypassing L&D entirely to build their own learning materials. The community recognized this not as a threat, but as an opportunity. For years, the function has been stuck in an administrative loop: receive a request, build a course, deliver it, repeat. The moment to step out of that loop and into something more strategic is now.

Watch the webinar Jess Almlie on what L&D needs to do to become more strategic

Skipping the content might be the most effective design decision you can make

One L&D leader built a leadership program with no content, instead they went all in on shared practice around real decisions. Their argument: leaders do not have knowledge problems, they have behavioral ones, and only practice in the presence of peers closes that gap. The community tested that claim against their own experience and it held.

Read the event recap from L&D Leaders Salon in Stockholm where we discussed how to make new behaviors stick

The knowledge walking out the door is the kind you cannot document

Another L&D leader identified that the tacit wisdom of seasoned experts, the judgment, the instinct, the knowing-when-to-break-the-rule, cannot be captured in a manual or a recorded lecture. The community validated a design principle together: the best way to transfer tacit knowledge is to build peer communities around real problems, before the people who hold it are gone.

Listen to L&D Leaders podcast where Katarina Noén shares how she's building peer learning communities

The debate the community did not resolve, and the consensus we found anyway

Is the LMS still the right foundation for learning, or is it solving for the wrong thing entirely? Some leaders argued that platforms built to track content consumption cannot support the shift to behavioral change and collective sense-making. Others pushed back: structured infrastructure still matters for compliance and coherence at scale, and that is something we can’t disregard.

But the room did reach one point of genuine consensus: you might not need an LMS to drive behavioral change, but you absolutely need a platform built for dialogue, peer interaction, and sense-making. The real question is not which tool you are using. It is whether the tool you are using was actually designed to enable how teams think and solve problems together, or just to record what individuals clicked.

That distinction is where the most useful thinking is happening right now.

The full conversation is inside

Members get the complete synthesis: all five shifts named by senior L&D leaders, the collective takeaways that emerged through group discussion, one concrete action per theme you can bring to your organization this week, and the full record of the debate on what learning infrastructure actually needs to do now.

This is the kind of thinking that happens when leaders stop presenting to each other and start working through hard problems together. If that is the room you want to be in, we would love to have you.

Apply to join the Howspace community to read the full summary