There’s a familiar frustration in L&D. “We’re being asked to build a solution before we’ve had the chance to understand the problem.” Suppliers say much the same thing. The brief arrives with the answer already baked in: build a programme, create some content, develop a learning pathway.
It’s a legitimate frustration, but I wonder if we’ve earned the right to complain. If L&D wants to move upstream, and suppliers want to be treated as partners rather than production houses, we need to get much better at having a different conversation. Not “what learning do you need?”, but “What does the organisation need to be capable of doing that it can’t do well enough today?”
And then, “What is the actual, demonstrable performance that will evidence we’ve got there?”.
And then “What (learning) intervention will embed capability development in the flow of work?”.
Oh, and let’s not forget “How will we measure capability uplift and the shift in organisational performance that triggered this in the first place”.
When these questions form the design foundation, you’re well on the way to meaningful impact, without having to be told what to do. I don’t hear them as often as I’d hope to. I also think time is running out even for this approach, as change accelerates and the notion of defining capability at a role level becomes less viable. The question is becoming: What do we need to be capable of doing tomorrow, that we may never have needed to do before?
This question points to a significant shift in how we think about capability development. We’re seeing the rise of enterprise skills-based thinking: starting not with the capabilities required for individual roles, but with the skills the organisation will need to execute its strategy and thrive in the future. That changes the sequence.
First, identify the critical skills the organisation will need. Then understand where those skills exist today, where the gaps are, and where they need to be strengthened, redeployed or developed across the enterprise. The unit of analysis starts to shift from “What capabilities does this role need?” to “What skills does this organisation need more of, and where do we need them?”
This matters because roles are changing too quickly to remain a stable foundation for capability development. AI, automation and changing operating models are continually redistributing work across roles, teams and technology. So rather than building increasingly detailed role-based capability frameworks, the opportunity is to create skill lifts across the organisation around the capabilities that matter most to future performance.
And that has consequences for L&D. Our job becomes less about closing predefined learning gaps within roles, and more about translating enterprise skill priorities into the performance shifts required across the organisation – then designing the learning, workflow, practice, tools, AI, leadership and performance support that will make those shifts happen. In other words, the performance gap still matters. But increasingly it is defined by the distance between the skills the organisation has today and the skills its strategy will require tomorrow. Traditional “learning” experiences I think will remain an important part of the solution, but only a part. That’s a very different starting point from being given a learning brief. We’d better get moving.