As I crawled towards the end of 2025, the hope of 2026 kept me going. I opened my laptop last week, and January abruptly arrived with the usual noise: new plans, new expectations, and a rush to make the year look bigger than the last. Rather than joining that noise, I think L&D teams would… Read More Three conversations
If nobody owns AI in learning, AI owns your learners. Earlier this week I showed you structural exclusion in a music festival lineup: 70% male headliners across five years. Small decisions repeated over time created a big pattern. The same thing is now happening with AI in European workplaces, especially financial services, where small procurement… Read More Someone else’s problem
Nick Davies at Thinqi has written a thoughtful piece on why L&D feels broken heading into 2026. His central argument: HR and L&D operate as separate functions when they should be one unified capability aligned to organisational outcomes. He’s right that this fragmentation isn’t new. What’s changed is that AI has made the conversation urgent… Read More Beyond Integration
As part of the thinking in my new book, I’d re-floating the idea of L&D as a broker. Brokerage is a new skill in modern L&D and we rarely name it. It’s the work between the request and the decision. You listen, interpret, challenge, redirect, and guide people to the option that actually solves the… Read More Strategic Brokerage
Seth Godin recently wrote about “ghost cities” – systems that still stand, still run, still look like infrastructure, but no longer hold real life. In workplace learning, the ghost city isn’t the LMS or the framework itself.It’s the assumptions they were built on: Those assumptions haven’t been true for years and this is why clarity… Read More Ghost infrastructure
Lost and Desperate 