Here’s the third of three posts about the Learning Technologies Conference and Exhibition last week. This post focuses on the second session I chaired for Kenny Temowo.

You already have a learning culture, but it’s probably not the one you designed.

Kenny opened the last session of the event with a line that really resonated; your learning culture isn’t the programmes you built.

• It’s the way your managers run a one-to-one.
• It’s what happens when a project goes wrong and someone watches how leadership responds.
• It’s what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and what people quietly learn never to say out loud.

L&D didn’t design that culture, but L&D is implicated in it. It also begs the question – if the day-to-day human experience is the learning culture, what does that make most L&D strategies?

Kenny’s answer is to shift from a learning needs lens to a business obstacles lens. Stop asking what people need to learn and start asking what is getting in the way of people doing great work.

The examples he brought from Netflix and now Nscale were concrete. Peer problem-solving sessions built around real business challenges instead of topic areas and an onboarding experience structured as a simulation of the environment new joiners will actually operate in, not a tour of the org chart. These are small, well-designed interventions that shift energy, safety, and performance.

The question he left the room with: how do we create the conditions for people to do great work?

The answer isn’t what content we need nor what programmes we should build. It’s about conditions and capacity.

That’s a different job, and plenty of the L&D functions I speak with aren’t structured to do that yet.