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.
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
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.