I’ve been catching up with a few people over the last week for some diverse and interesting conversations. As I’ve mentioned before, having the opportunity to collect people’s stories, thoughts and thinking, and disassemble them to reassemble them into something new is a privilege and something I am ever grateful for.

I’ve deliberately created opportunities to speak with many ‘non-learning’ people. I’m reading voraciously but there are no LnD books open at the moment; I’m working my way through books on podcast production, culturalism, politics, health and wellbeing, and philosophy. With a focus on resources not courses in the learning space, and curation over creation, it’s more urgent than ever that LnD professionals understand the need to seek out and engage with thinking outside of the usual LnD space. This ‘should’ mean LnD people seeking out the workplace experts, the technology experts, the futurists, the AI experts etc.

What’s good to see is that people are beginning to start to do this. The informed have been doing this a while and are ahead of the curve as organisations are beginning to make sense of what post-pandemic working might look like (not that we’re anywhere near that yet). These smart leaders are looking ahead, having taken the LnD blinkers off and recognise the strategic imperative to improve the LnD function.

Take time out to see what people outside your space are doing. Speak to the people inside your organisation first and then see who your professional contacts are engaging with and work outside your organisation. You owe it to your function, your organisation but – most importantly – yourself.