Donald Taylor is a researcher, industry commentator, and author of the annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey. He joined Jason Gorman on The Learning Experience Ops Show to discuss twelve years of data, the Transformation Triangle, and what it will actually take to build a learning function that survives what comes next.
Every year for the past twelve years, Donald Taylor has asked thousands of learning professionals around the world one simple question: what do you think will be hot in workplace L&D in the year ahead?
The answers, compiled in his annual L&D Global Sentiment Survey, form one of the most revealing documents in the profession. Not because they tell you what people are doing, but because they tell you what people are feeling. What they are hopeful about. What they are nervous about. And, with the benefit of hindsight, how often they are wrong.
“We’re definitely reacting to shiny objects,” Taylor says without hesitation. “More things drop out of the survey than ever get adopted widely.”
And yet, something has been different about AI. Something has been different for a while now.
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The One That Did Not Drop
The history of the sentiment survey is largely a story of things that peaked and faded. Mobile learning. Wearables. The metaverse. Micro-learning. Each arrived with momentum, captured attention, and then receded as either business-as-usual or a quiet admission that it had never quite landed.
AI has not followed this pattern. It has held the top position in a way no other topic has. And Taylor has made a decision that signals just how serious that is: he is pulling AI off the survey entirely for 2027.
“At the moment it’s like asking people: what’s your most important thing in the kitchen? Is it the fridge freezer? Is it the dishwasher? Or is it electricity? It doesn’t make any sense.”
When something becomes infrastructure, it stops being a trend. That is where AI is heading. And that shift has significant consequences for how learning professionals should be positioning themselves.
Five Reactions, Two That Work
Taylor is clear that there are five distinct ways an L&D professional or team can respond to AI. He is equally clear that most of them lead nowhere good.
Doing nothing will eventually cost you the job. Using AI only to make existing admin slightly faster is better, but not by much. Producing courses at greater speed using AI, what Taylor calls the boombox approach, is a flat line at best: the same thing, louder.
The two responses that actually move the needle are tactical and strategic. Tactical means using AI to do old things in genuinely new ways: better simulations, smarter skills analysis, more responsive design. Strategic means using AI to do things that simply were not possible before, powering approaches the field has never had the tools to attempt.
“We’re not using it as electricity to power an existing process faster,” Taylor says. “We’re using it as electricity to power something we simply couldn’t power before.”
The challenge is that most of the field is still somewhere between doing nothing and boomboxing. And the window for changing that is not unlimited.
Three Futures for L&D
Taylor’s Transformation Triangle, developed with co-author Egle Vinauskaite, proposes that L&D teams need to choose one of three distinct directions for the future. They are not a menu you can sample from. They are mutually exclusive.
The first is the skills authority: a central department that genuinely understands the skills landscape of an organisation, builds the trust of leadership, and manages skills as a business-critical asset rather than an HR checklist. Not a competency spreadsheet. A living function that shapes how people develop and how the organisation grows.
The second is the enablement partner: a team focused less on creation and more on circulation. Finding the knowledge that already exists inside an organisation and building the infrastructure for it to spread. The hotel team in Sydney that finds a way to cut check-in time by three minutes should not need to wait for the L&D department to turn that into a mandatory course. They should be able to capture and share it themselves, supported by the right tools and trust.
The third is the adaptation engine: the most radical of the three. Here, L&D as a standalone department effectively dissolves into a multidisciplinary team that tackles complex performance problems at the root. Taylor gives the example of high employee turnover: rather than defaulting to a management training course, this team investigates, interviews, and discovers that the real issue is a misalignment between the employee value proposition people were sold and the one they are actually living. The response involves marketing, job design, and yes, some training. But training as one ingredient in a complex solution, not the whole prescription.
“We’ve been too often the cure-all for problems,” Taylor says. “We’ll put them on a training course. And very seldom is it the cure-all it pretends to be.”
The Thing That Runs Under All Three
Whatever direction a team chooses, Taylor keeps returning to the same prerequisite. Trust. Not the kind that comes from a well-designed stakeholder deck, but the kind that accumulates over time through relationships, responsiveness, and results.
He recalls a conversation with Heather Stefanski, Chief Learning Officer at McKinsey, who told him she checks her diary to measure whether she is doing her job well. If at least half her time is not spent in conversation with people across the business, she knows something is off.
“It is the people who build and maintain those networks that are best able to implement the next technology, run the next change program when it comes along, have somebody support them when things get stuck.”
Taylor is not romantic about this. He is practical. The next disruption will come, as they always do. The people best positioned to navigate it will not be the ones who picked the right technology. They will be the ones who were trusted enough to be given the chance to try.
One Last Thought on Electricity
Taylor is planning to remove AI from his 2027 survey. Not because it is going away, but because it is becoming too foundational to treat as a trend. It will be in everything. The question will no longer be whether you are using it. The question will be what, exactly, you have chosen to build with it.
The field has spent years asking what is hot. That question served its purpose. The more important question now is: when the infrastructure is invisible and the shiny object is gone, what kind of L&D professional are you left being?
The answer to that is not a tool. It is a choice made long before the next Tuesday when everything changes again.
Listen to the full conversation with Donald Taylor on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with Donald Taylor
Jason Gorman (00:00)
Welcome to the Learning Experience Operations Show, where we talk about making learning better and future ready. I am Jason Gorman, the founder and CEO of Jackrabbit Learning Experience. There is a question, what will be hot in workplace L &D in the year ahead? And this is a question that my guest today, Donald Taylor, has been asking thousands of learning professionals around the world every year for the past 12 years, publishing the results and his analysis in his annual L &D.
Global Sentiment Survey. Donald is a researcher and industry commentator and has pulled some fascinating insights from his research just from this one question. And reading the reports, you can kind of track our collective aspirations as learning professionals. You can see the pressures we’re responding to in the world and also in our organizations. And one of the things that I spotted on my last read are some of the things that were
we’re kind of anxious about that maybe we feel a little lacking in. ⁓ In recent years, Donald has paired this first question with a second question, too. What’s hard in workplace learning right now? So I am excited to dig into what Donald is seeing and what it might mean for the year ahead. Donald Taylor, welcome to the show.
Donald Taylor (01:23)
Great to be here, Jason. Thanks for the invitation.
Jason Gorman (01:26)
Yeah, my pleasure. All right, so we’ll get started with some lightning round questions. This is just to kind of warm us both up. ⁓ We’ll start with this one. What is the 30 second elevator pitch for what you do?
Donald Taylor (01:41)
I don’t need 30 seconds. I can do it in five seconds. I help the learning and development profession get ready for the future. So I appreciate that’s like only two stories in an elevator. I can go into more detail, but that’s the elevator pitch. I help the L and D profession get ready for the future. I do it through research, sharing ideas, thinking about the big picture and drawing on nearly 40 years of experience working with learning and technology.
Jason Gorman (01:44)
Okay. wonderful.
It’s marvelous. Well, we’re definitely going to dig into the future and your experience. All right, so the next question is, when you are dialed in at work, what is the thing you are most likely to be doing when you’re in that flow state?
Donald Taylor (02:25)
Two answers to this, very different. One is bend over an Excel sheet or some form of data manipulation, asking and answering what I call the second question. So I’ve seen data and I pulled out some data and I’ve asked one question, what’s happening this year? And then I look at it and I say, well, that’s strange. And I’m trying to ask the second question. I’m pulling an answer out. That’s one thing, solitary occupation at my desk. The other dialed in.
Jason Gorman (02:27)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Donald Taylor (02:55)
I’m with an audience, maybe we’ve got 40 people in the room, we’re having a conversation, click, click, click, we’re all bouncing off each other, it’s a great experience and we’re sharing and surfacing ideas.
Jason Gorman (03:05)
You’ve been at this for a little while.
I’ve been at this for a little while. I love asking this question. People come into this weird profession through lots of doors, but I’m curious about what was the event or the moment that inspired you to do this in the first place?
Donald Taylor (03:22)
Again, I’m going to give a slightly long answer to this one. ⁓ I don’t have that single moment when I thought, this is what I want to do. But when I graduated from Oxford University, everybody was going into the banking sector. They’re all hugely rich now, of course. They’re all going into banking. And I didn’t want to do that. I went and did a course on how to teach English as foreign language. And there was a moment…
Jason Gorman (03:29)
Hmm.
Okay.
Donald Taylor (03:52)
when this was before the World Wide Web, and I was down in the basement of this beautiful building where we all learned how to teach English. And there was a notice board in front of me because that’s how you discovered what job you were going to do. And it had things on it from all over the world. Shanghai, we want somebody to teach English. New York, you teach English. Khartoum in Sudan, teach English. Istanbul, and I chose Istanbul because for various reasons, I thought it was a great place to go it was. But that moment…
standing in front of that literally cork board with these things all over it, I remember very distinctly at this moment when I thought, with learning, the world is my oyster, I can go anywhere, I’ve made the right choice.
Jason Gorman (04:27)
Yeah.
Hmm.
I also taught, that was actually my first, that was my first job in this field as well. I teaching English as a foreign language. I lived in a city north of Dubai for a year, yeah. So I hear you on that. We should have, we can do another podcast next time about, yeah.
Donald Taylor (04:44)
Right.
I think there’s a lot to be said for it because I think there’s
a lot you learn in that job that is absolutely applicable elsewhere. Also, it’s one of the few professions of teaching and training adults where there’s actually a structure and there’s qualifications which people typically have to go through. And that’s a good thing as well because actually elsewhere in the profession there’s very little.
Jason Gorman (05:04)
Mm-hmm.
boy, you just opened a wonderful can of worms that I, maybe we can dig into later, because I would love to talk more about that. I don’t have a question prepared, but maybe we can figure that one out. Okay, so a couple more lightning round questions. Where has our profession gotten better in your time studying it?
Donald Taylor (05:14)
you
We’ve actually absolutely got better at being inclusive and being inclusive of people of different genders, different sexualities, different identities of all sorts. And also, course, people with different, we’re not there yet on any of this, but people with different sensory needs. People with maybe hearing impairment, visual impairment, mobility impairment. That’s stuff that we are getting much better at than we ever used to be. And that’s very good to see.
Jason Gorman (05:46)
Mm.
That’s so much more of a heartwarming answer than I expected. That’s wonderful. All right, the opposite. Where has our profession gotten worse?
Donald Taylor (06:08)
I think we’ve gotten worse by clinging on to what’s worked in the past, which is no guide to the future, and in particular, the idea that learning and development is all about creating and distributing content, which it absolutely was when I started training as English as a foreign language in the 1980s, but it isn’t anymore. But we carry that load with us still.
Jason Gorman (06:34)
All right, last lightning round question. What are you learning right now? This could be something that’s work related or not, but what’s something that you are putting effort into learning?
Donald Taylor (06:44)
Look, I’m in my 60s, but every Thursday night, I go out with a bunch of dads from my kids’ primary school, kindergarten school. Well, I say kindergarten, the kids have all grown up and they’ve graduated from university now, but we still go out and we play five-a-side soccer every evening, right? Indoor football. I’m in goal, right? What I’m trying to do is improve my speed over short distances. It sounds much more…
Jason Gorman (06:52)
Yeah.
Wow.
Donald Taylor (07:13)
athletic than it actually is. But as a goalkeeper, when you’re in the goal and you dive to do something, in your mind, you’re like a tiger leaping across the goal. You watch the video and it’s this sloth making its way slowly to the ball. That’s no good, right? So as you get older, your reactions slow down and it’s really important to be able to move faster to compensate. So that’s what I’m working on. I’m working on my explosive
speed over about two or three meters.
Jason Gorman (07:44)
That’s very interesting. And that is a learnable, that is a learnable, you can learn how to do that better.
Donald Taylor (07:47)
You see, I’m not sure learning
is there, but I think it’s a weird one because what I’m actually building is the ability to do it. So I’m muscle strength in my legs. Is it a learning thing? I’m not sure, but I know I need to do it in order to do my job better.
Jason Gorman (08:04)
That’s very interesting. Thank you for sharing that. ⁓ All right, we’ll get into some longer form questions now. So you have stressed for over a decade that your survey measures sentiment. So what people feel is hot. It’s like Tinder for, people, I must have made this joke, right? It’s like Tinder for L and D. How is that possible?
Donald Taylor (08:06)
You
Nobody, nobody has made this joke before. Nobody. I don’t know.
You’re a natural wit, Jason. That’s all I can say.
Jason Gorman (08:35)
That’s not true, but I appreciate
that anyway. ⁓ So people are rating what’s hot in the coming year rather than what they’re actually doing. This is so interesting to me. ⁓ But looking back at the data since 2014, we kind of see a couple trajectories. On one hand, in your first report, mobile delivery started at one. It was the thing that people thought was the hottest thing the coming year.
Donald Taylor (08:59)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jason Gorman (09:03)
And then it just sank to the bottom because in your report you say that it basically became like invisible. It’s like a utility. ⁓ On the other hand, ⁓ you can have something like the metaverse that just never, it debuted at like 14, it was towards the bottom of the list and LND just never bought it. ⁓ So I’m curious based on all of these years of data,
How good is our intuition about things that will be hot? How good is our intuition at actually predicting what we will be doing in our operations? Is the report generally a good indicator of things that we do, or are we just kind of reacting to shiny objects?
Donald Taylor (09:52)
We’re definitely reacting to shiny objects. There’s no question about that. And I’ve got an interesting proof point about that. But it doesn’t mean we’re wrong. It may be the object is shiny because it’s something new and powerful and it will be adopted widely. The proof of the shiny object thing is that re-skilling and up-skilling was, it was number one for a couple of years. And then it dropped away from being number one, except in Sweden where…
Suddenly, in the year that everyone pushed it back to number two, it rose to being number one by a substantial margin. And I was doing webinars to the Swedes and I said, what on is going on here? Why are you suddenly all agog for reskilling and upskilling? ⁓ it’s very simple. Per Lager brought out a book in August called Reskill Op.
Upskill, I think it’s called. Yeah, and it was reskill and upskill, right, in Swedish. And so what happened was it was a huge hit in Sweden. Everyone was reading it and it was on everybody’s mind. So that was a hot, shiny thing at that moment. And we’ve seen this again and again, mobile deliveries, actually, micro learning is a very good example where that was super hot in the States, wasn’t hot elsewhere. The next year it became hot in Europe, tailed away in the States and then tailed away elsewhere.
There’s a sort of ripple effect, typically starting in the States for new things. But it doesn’t mean necessarily it’s wrong. So I think, yeah, the sentiment is definitely influenced by what people are talking about. But sometimes that can be right. So I think underneath your question is this question of what happens when people think something is hot? Does it get adopted later or not? Now, you know that I do reference the
Jason Gorman (11:20)
Mm-hmm.
Donald Taylor (11:37)
got the hype cycle. No, sorry, I read as that, but I also referenced the Everett Rogers diffusion of innovation curve in this. And typically the people I’m asking to respond to the survey, people who are enthusiastic about technology, enthusiastic about new things, it’s a self-selecting sample. So I go out and I say, do you want to vote? And people say, yeah, okay, I’ll vote. And they do that because they’re interested in what’s happening. So the people we’re getting voting are
Jason Gorman (11:39)
Yes.
Donald Taylor (12:05)
on the left-hand side of the Everett Rogers diffusion of innovation curve. They’re the innovators, they’re the early adopters. And what I’m interested in knowing is, well, of those things that these people think are hot, how many of them will actually move over to the mainstream, to the early majority, over a period of perhaps three or four years? And I would say that, to answer your question, Donald, how good are we actually at saying what’s going to move forward?
Jason Gorman (12:20)
Hmm.
Donald Taylor (12:33)
Not very is the answer. More things drop out of the survey than ever get adopted widely. So wearables came on and went off in the course of one year because nobody was talking about it. If I’d had the metaverse on one year earlier, it would have spiked enormously, but it got overtaken by AI and got completely crushed by it. ⁓
Typically, we’re not very good at choosing these things, but some of them are. And for me, that’s the point of the survey, is to get an idea of which ones that we’re talking about are the things that will continue to be used in the future. And I’m going to say straightforwardly, AI is absolutely one of those. AI is something that is going to be used in the future in learning and development, never mind the fact that it is hyped.
Never mind there’s all the fact that it’s almost certainly a stock market bubble around AI, it is going to change our lives and we will be using it like it or not in the future.
Jason Gorman (13:28)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
the incredible. ⁓
kind of jolts of moving back and forth seems to for now kind of, I would say AI is holding that top spot in a remarkable way. Git like looking at the sort of history of the survey. Do you, and I’m with you, I think it’s here to stay. I would imagine, I don’t think about, I don’t name electricity as an important ⁓ thing in my life, but it is one of the most important,
technologies in my life. I kind of think I might go this way. It’s just going to be in all the things. Yes, please, please.
Donald Taylor (14:05)
But you’re 100 % right, Jason, exactly. You’re 100 % right. Yeah.
Sure, sure. And in fact Jason, I’m trying to interrupt you there for a second. I am gonna take it
off the survey for 2027. It won’t be on the survey for exactly that reason. At the moment, it’s like asking people, what’s your most important thing in the kitchen? Is it the fridge freezer? Is it the dishwasher? Or is it electricity? It doesn’t make any sense. When I put it on the survey in 2017, it kind of made sense because it was a discrete thing that was used in the backend of some systems.
and then it exploded with the launch of ChatGPT. So you’re absolutely right. I’m going to have to completely reorganize my entire survey because AI has just completely changed everything. We’ll continue with the same process. We’ll continue with the same question, but it will be a much revised list from 2027 onwards. Yeah.
Jason Gorman (15:01)
That’s interesting. I’m curious, as you see people, ⁓ you talk to a lot of people around the world, but I just want to ask this question in general. Is there a price that you think we pay as learning professionals as we are reacting to these trends? We should be, but are we reacting appropriately? Are we overreacting?
Donald Taylor (15:11)
Hmm.
Jason Gorman (15:31)
Are there prices that we’re paying operationally or to our time that we should be aware of that you’ve spotted?
Donald Taylor (15:38)
That’s a great question. I think it’s impossible to give a single answer because it depends on who’s the person doing the reacting because people are reacting in different ways. I would say there are five different ways in which we can react to something like AI. One is to do nothing. And actually, generally, that’s not a bad reaction to a lot of things because you can get to see what other people are doing. But if you continue to do nothing, you will eventually not have a job.
because AI is going to transform everything so much it’s pointless. You can react in a way that improves your basic efficiency. So you use AI as a tool to help you with.
email with things in the office. That’s a bit better than doing nothing, but at the same point, if you’re not using it to fundamentally rethink what you’re doing, it’s going to leave you without a job in the future. I’m sorry to be so negative and dramatic, but it is simply the case. We’re seeing with AI a repeated trend that we’ve seen in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution.
Jason Gorman (16:33)
Yeah.
Donald Taylor (16:41)
and introductions of new technology generally that people who have particular skills do end up losing their jobs because they are replaced. It doesn’t mean there aren’t new jobs. It doesn’t mean people in the same profession can’t do things in that same profession. But the particular task of creating content is absolutely going to be transformed by AI, possibly in negative way, but it’s going to be transformed and we have to do other things. So if you’re continuing to do that,
Jason Gorman (16:56)
Mm-hmm.
Donald Taylor (17:09)
Either you do nothing with AI or you’re just using it to improve efficiency, you are going to not have a job in five years time. The other three things you could use, the other three ways you can adapt, one is to do what I call do the same thing but louder. It’s what I call the boombox approach. You have the transistor radio, but suddenly you’ve got a boombox, which is the same functionality as your transistor radio. It plays cassettes, it plays the radio, but it’s bigger and louder. So same deal. Now…
That means you’re doing courses, you’re creating courses faster, maybe they look sexier and so on. I think that’s like a flat line. I’m not sure where it ends up. I think you end up being a slave to a production cycle that just simply becomes much, much more efficient. After that, you can start doing old things in a new way. So you can start doing things which are tactically superior to what we’ve done in the past. So you might find new ways of doing…
Jason Gorman (17:39)
Mm-hmm.
Donald Taylor (18:02)
skills training, you might find new ways of doing skills analysis, you might find new ways of doing simulations, All the stuff we’re doing at the moment, but you’re doing that old thing in a new way. Now that lifts you up. You’re not focused so much on the content side of things, you’re prepared to accept that is something which is going to become a commodity very rapidly. So you’re focusing on these other areas where you can provide more impact. That’s a tactical change. The other thing you can do is to focus on the strategic change.
Jason Gorman (18:22)
Hmm.
Donald Taylor (18:31)
which is to think I’m going to do new things in new way. It’s very difficult to say what those are, but we have seen some organizations doing them. In the transformation triangle, which I hope we’ll get to, we’ve seen organizations that are doing things entirely differently powered by AI and by the things which AI make possible. So we’re not using it as electricity to power an existing process faster. We’re using it as electricity to power something we simply couldn’t power before.
Jason Gorman (18:41)
Yeah.
Donald Taylor (18:59)
So those are the five things we can do. Nothing, a sort of admin change, a bit of ⁓ boombox changing, a tactical change or a strategic change. I think only the tactical and strategic really take us up into the future. The rest of them end up, well, probably leading nowhere and ultimately probably to a space where we are dealing with the production of a commodity content.
Jason Gorman (19:22)
That’s a fabulous rubric. And you mentioned the transformation triangle. I’d love to talk about that. So you suggest in your report that was, I think, September of last year.
Donald Taylor (19:33)
September 30th, yeah. And
we’ve to give a shout out to the co-author, Eglavid Elskaiter. I’ll pronounce that name because it is a bit tricky.
Jason Gorman (19:39)
Thank you.
Appreciate that. No, I really appreciate your work on that. It was really fascinating. Everybody should read it. So you talk about L &D needs to pivot to become either a skills authority, an enablement partner, or an adaptation. I don’t know what’s wrong with me at the moment. An enablement partner or an adaptation engine.
Donald Taylor (20:00)
We spent so long, Jason, we spent so long looking for these words and at the end of it we thought, oh my lord, these are really difficult words to say. It’s not just you, I struggle myself.
Jason Gorman (20:09)
I would kid everything you just said that rubric that you just gave us it seems like if we were to kind of take those ideas about what’s important for the future and think about what is the future of of our operations of how we have what we what we are individually as practitioners and leaders but also What we’re doing as organizations you’ve given us three interesting visions for the future I would love to hear a little bit about each of those
Donald Taylor (20:22)
Mm, mm, yeah.
So the skills authority, which is one of the three areas you can get to on the triangle. And all of these, by the way, represent and move away from the focus on content. So you move away from that to a focus on skills. A lot of organizations talk about skills, but the skills authority is a central organization within an organization, so a department, which really understands skills and provides the mechanism, the plumbing, if you like.
for skills and an understanding of them to be spread throughout the organization to be not something that is an addition to work, but is seen as a business critical asset. Now, consultancies typically are taking a view like this. They’re going to make sure that people have the right skills and knowledge to do their job. And we see organizations doing this already. The people in that skills authority also need to have a great understanding of the science of learning so they can help people.
bring on new knowledge and also learn the new skills they need as time evolves and the skills they need evolve. So it’s more than simply having a competency framework. It’s about having the trust of the organization that you can manage this business critical resource, which is the skills of people.
Jason Gorman (21:47)
Mm-hmm.
This In the L &D discourse, there’s a lot of conversation about ⁓ And actually in eating your reports, there’s a lot of conversation about about value the value we bring to organizations and This seems to be ⁓ Really embedded maybe in all three of these things, but certainly in this one this idea that
We need to be there as consultants in a proactive way where we’re partnering with the overall organization, bringing our expertise, pushing back where necessary, well, being consultants. It sounds like this is an embedded, ⁓ well, actually, let me ask you a question. Is the idea here that the skills authority is an embedded organization within a large company or?
Donald Taylor (22:28)
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (22:53)
Could it also be an external organization? ⁓ Where do you think it’s best positioned? I think is maybe the question.
Donald Taylor (23:00)
I think it would be very difficult to do it externally because I think you need to
have the knowledge of how the business operates, but you also need to have the trust of the people who are talking about these skills. When you’re talking about skills, it’s not just an individual who says, I want to develop myself in a particular area. There’s usually a conversation between an individual and the person they report to where they get an honest assessment.
from that person of how they’re doing with their skills. This is a crucial management role, helping people develop themselves. And the best organizations are able to have honest conversations around that because they have clearly laid out views of what skills actually look like in terms of observable behaviors. Well, you are doing this, you’re not doing that. We need to develop you in this way in order that you can pursue your path. So if you think of how we…
facilitate and support those conversations. I would say it’s far easier to do that if you’re part of the organization rather than coming in from the outside. Because if you’re coming in from the outside, well, after you’ve had that conversation between the manager and the report, they can say, look, you know, it’s just so-and-so from X corporation who wants to make this happen. It’s another HR initiative. We won’t bother about it. It has to be seen as being a sincere.
important business resource, you’re talking about the skills that you’ve got.
Jason Gorman (24:26)
Mm-hmm and just from again from this sort of operations perspective. This sounds like a pretty This is a strange word to use but it sounds like a pretty intimate job right as an individual I’m going into somebody’s space. I’m learning about what they do. I’m understanding them their needs where the gaps are
This is not me with a spreadsheet trying to work it out based on data. Maybe that’s part of it also, but it is sounds like a very human, a connected human job.
Donald Taylor (24:58)
I think intimate is actually a really good word to use though, Jason. Yeah, the idea that you’re touching on something which for a person is very important to them in terms of their career, but also possibly their identity. So it’s not something trivial. So yes, it is intimate. And I think having that sensitivity is an important part of doing the job right. And again, that would make it more difficult for somebody from the outside to do it, I think.
Jason Gorman (25:26)
And how would you contrast the other two, the enablement partner or the adaptation engine?
Donald Taylor (25:31)
So skills authority is a central authority in the organization. And enablement partner is also a central role, but it’s much more concerned with ensuring that the knowledge that exists throughout the organization is able to be spread rapidly. So classic example is there’s a hotel chain. The people in Sydney discover a way to make the check-in process three minutes faster. Right, okay.
might not sound like much, but if you’ve got a lot of people in the queue, that could be super important. And it definitely affects customer experience positively. So let’s make sure everybody in the organization can learn about that. You don’t need to have that information captured by the learning and development department, put into a course, and then distributed as a mandatory course across the organization. You just need a way that the people themselves in Sydney can describe it, capture it, and spread it.
Jason Gorman (26:05)
Sure.
you
Yeah.
Donald Taylor (26:25)
through a mechanism. Now, yes, there’ll be, I don’t know, some sort of system whereby that information, that knowledge is spread about. But to make it actually happen effectively and not have a lot of rubbish clogging up the system, the enablement partner department needs to firstly have the trust of people and needs to trust people that they can do a good job with it. They need to provide some guidelines.
Jason Gorman (26:38)
Mm-hmm.
Donald Taylor (26:53)
Not everything has to be high powered instructional design, but you do have to have a way of doing this well. The mechanism for doing it, some tools and a mechanism for spreading the information around effectively, that people can find what they want, when they want it, and it can help them. In the old days, that might’ve been a SharePoint directory, should probably be a bit more sophisticated these days. So you do all those things and you can make it happen, but the underlying thing here…
Jason Gorman (26:56)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Donald Taylor (27:22)
bit like being the skills authority is a sense of the strategic importance of the organization. What are we trying to achieve here? Which of the things that people could talk about are important? And the trust of the people involved. I think these are the things which are common to all of the nodes on the triangle. That sense of a strategic understanding and the trust of the people.
Jason Gorman (27:36)
Hmm. Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah. This vision sounds really strikingly different from Skills Authority. When I hear you describe Skills Authority, it does sound, like I said, very relational, intimate. I’m glad that was an OK word. Enablement partner sounds a little bit closer to a combination of IT and instructional design.
Donald Taylor (28:01)
It could be, but I think it’s dangerous, dangerous again, just with skills authority. Yeah, we can do skills authority. We’ve got an Excel spreadsheet, some skills on it. No, it’s more complex than that. And I think enablement partner, I think the key thing is to have the tools with which it’s possible for people locally to capture and express their thinking in a way that is sound, but is not complex.
And I think that’s always the tough balance you’ve got to strike with that. I’ve seen things like this for more than a decade actually, but I think we’ve got to the stage now where it’s possible to do it really quite effectively with some of the tools that are now available.
Jason Gorman (28:29)
Mm. Mm.
So I suppose there is ⁓ some, in a department like that, would be, we’d need to have the skill set of user experience, whatever that means. You’d have to make this process for the people in the hotel in Australia. All they have to do is open it to understand it, right? You don’t need a course to learn how to,
access the thing, it needs to be self-explanatory, easy to work. So that seems like another critical piece of the operations there.
Donald Taylor (29:18)
But ideally that asset however it’s produced is not being produced by somebody in the learning development department but they will look at it and check that it’s okay, they will give some advice on it but it’s being produced by the people in Sydney.
Jason Gorman (29:28)
Right.
Right. And what I mean, what I mean,
though, is that in the enable in in making that simple, that there is pressure on the enablement partnership team to make sure that ⁓ nobody ever has any question about where they should go, what they should do, how to record, what works right, that it just needs to be seamless and simple the way that it is to open up a good app on your phone and know what you’re supposed to do.
Donald Taylor (29:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Exactly. Yeah.
Jason Gorman (30:03)
and then adaptation engine.
Donald Taylor (30:05)
This is the craziest one because this is where learning and development really kind of fails or stops existing. It becomes part of something bigger. It’s possibly a Tiger team. It’s possibly just a different department. But it is, and we’ve seen this happen in a couple of instances where the only department becomes part of something larger, which is, if you like, a multifunctional team that goes off and tackles performance issues. Yes, at a tactical level, but also with a strategic view. So you’ve got
let’s say that you’ve got an organization where there is high turnover in one part of the organization, you could go in and say, we’re going to give the managers a training course on how to be better managers and that will reduce the turnover in their department. But in the example that we found, what happened was this team went in, multidisciplinary team went in and looked at it and said, what’s the problem?
Jason Gorman (30:50)
Mm-hmm.
Donald Taylor (30:59)
why is there the turnover rather than going in with the assumption of what the problem is, which is too often the case. And they found by interviewing people, talking to people who left the organization and other things as well, the issue wasn’t necessarily that the managers weren’t managing well. It was that the employee value proposition, the reason people came to work in the first place was poorly expressed and people didn’t feel that the…
employee value proposition that they were living was what they’d been sold when they joined the organization. So the response to this is pretty straightforward. You say, well, okay, we’re going to change that proposition and we’re going to see if we can’t make what people experience in the day a bit more like what they thought they should be experiencing. And that’s a variety of things that are involved there. Marketing is involved, job descriptions are involved.
perhaps even the job architecture is involved as well. And also there’s some training involved for managers so they know what’s going on and possibly for employees themselves as well. So it’s a complex solution to a complex problem, which is probably the way it should be, rather than trying to be what we’ve been in the past, which is the cure-all for problems, we’ll put them on a training course and very seldom is it the cure-all it pretends to be.
Jason Gorman (31:53)
you
Yeah.
Hmm. Hmm.
Helping the, it’s the more holi, sounds more holistic. You’re helping the organization shift and evolve, adapt as it were. Yeah.
Donald Taylor (32:22)
Yes.
Yeah. And again, you
absolutely have to have the strategic view there. You’ve got to understand what it is that the organization’s trying to achieve so that you can go in and provide the right solution to these complex issues.
Jason Gorman (32:34)
Mm-hmm.
Are these three corners of the transformation triangle mutually exclusive or can they all exist in the same organization?
Donald Taylor (32:49)
Long conversations with with Eglert and we agreed that they are mutually exclusive. You can’t be a centralized skills authority and be a decentralized enablement partner. You can’t be in an L &D department and not be in an L &D department. Of course, if you’re dealing with any of these things, you will have skills involved. Of course, you will be looking at other factors as the adaptation engine does. But you can’t say I’m sort of halfway on this line. I think you’ve got to decide where you are.
Jason Gorman (32:53)
Hmm.
Donald Taylor (33:17)
and know what your dominant theme is, if you like, for your department for the future.
Jason Gorman (33:22)
Well, here’s a question that that perhaps the the retirement of all of our listeners may depend on Where do we where do we place our bets? Dress as individual professionals We don’t we don’t know which of these will become the dominant model How in this this moment where everything is changing every Tuesday? Radically and we think
Donald Taylor (33:28)
Ha ha ha.
Mm.
Jason Gorman (33:47)
Dear, there’s another whole technology that completely forces me to rethink some aspect of my process or the fundamental construction of the existence of my department. How do we just make the right bet and be prepared for the future?
Donald Taylor (34:02)
I don’t think it’s the case that one of these three things will turn out to be the way of the future. I think all three of them will exist. There may even be other ones as well. This is a way that we spend a lot of time looking at all the data we collect. 20 case studies printed in the report, a bunch of case studies and interviews not included, 20,000 words of responses to our survey and so on, all boiled down to those
words on a triangle.
It may be, as I say, there are other nodes in the future that appear. Maybe it’s a square or a pentagon we don’t know. We have three at the moment. How do we place our bets? I think you look at your context. And actually, I’m working with Eglert right now on a report which should come out in April. We look at your, which attempts to answer this question. I think you look at your context. If you’re a highly distributed organization, it may be that being an enablement partner,
is the best way to go. If you’re a consultancy, you’re probably going to be looking more at the skills part of it. It may be that if you’re a startup, that you don’t want to be either of those two, but an adaptation engine, because you need to be working very rapidly dealing with a hit squad to tackle some of the performance issues that crop up on the way. And it may be that over time, that then changes to another one of these different futures.
I think the key starting point is context and the thing that underlies them all is trust and belief in the organization. People have to trust you, you have to trust the organization and they have to believe that you can do the job. And you know, when it comes back to operational stuff, Jason’s always comes back to, well, when did I last see that person do something that worked for me? Whatever the future is for learning and development, the best preparation for it is to do a damn good job right now.
Jason Gorman (35:37)
Hmm.
Donald Taylor (35:57)
so that people say, yeah, they fixed a problem for me. I trust them.
Jason Gorman (35:57)
Yeah.
We kind of highlighted this with skills authority, but I’m glad that you’ve reiterated it across the three of them. do, I’m with you. I think that this field is fundamentally relational. At the end of the day, that is the bedrock of what we do. It is relating to other people. It is empathizing with them. It is ⁓ then learning, you know, having the knowledge, skills and tools to just make, help them connect with the thing that’s going to help them with
reach their own aspirations or the things that they need to do today or tomorrow. So I appreciate you reiterating that across all three. I really do. ⁓ Because frankly, without that, wouldn’t want to do this. I wouldn’t want to do this work.
Donald Taylor (36:47)
But think that’s fair, yeah. And because we’re not soulless pushers of information into people’s heads. We’re trying to help people. Yeah, it’s true.
Jason Gorman (36:55)
Yeah, but we act, but we, lot of us act that way.
I hate, I hate to say it, but I would say at our worst, that’s what we are. And not always, not, it’s not always our fault. I think we, I think we are, and we talk, we complain about this loudly publicly. I think we are also very misunderstood in terms of what our roles are and how we can really help and.
where we can be most valuable. And as I’m thinking about organizational design and these three models within the transformation triangle, I think if we do have that trust, one of the ways that we could leverage it, I would imagine, would be to work with the right people within our organizations to help develop out these visions and shepherd the organization towards a coherent vision.
Donald Taylor (37:44)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Gorman (37:51)
for how learning and development happens inside that organization.
Donald Taylor (37:54)
And what you said there is very important, Jason, which is we need to be proactive about it. Nobody in the organization is going to come knock on the door of the training department and say, you know what, we need to make a plan for you becoming a skills authority. It ain’t going to happen. They don’t even know what you do in that room, right? No. So you’ve got to take the lead and say, from the context, from what’s going on here, this looks to me like we need to be moving in this direction. Spell that out as a strategy.
Jason Gorman (38:08)
Right. No, no.
Donald Taylor (38:23)
people will be quite impressed. They’ll think, ⁓ right, so we’re not dealing with a 19th century model of knowledge transfer, we’re actually dealing with something that suits us in the 21st century.
Jason Gorman (38:34)
Yeah, there was something that I was really fascinated by across your reports. So during the pandemic, ⁓ 2021, 2022, there was this stronger desire for collaboration and social learning. So it makes sense. We all wanted more human connection. And now, of course, things have swung back towards the technology and AI. And this seems like a
Donald Taylor (38:44)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (39:04)
bit of a pattern in what we’ve seen, this kind of tension between the hot thing being the technology and the hot thing being these kind of fundamental bedrock things that we’ve just been talking about, the trust, the relational aspects of our jobs. And I would even extend that to fundamentals like understanding learning science and how people learn and being good listeners, good.
Donald Taylor (39:16)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Gorman (39:31)
good designers, empathetic designers. It seems like there is an interesting kind of swinging back and forth between those two things. Do you think, how do we, is this, I’m curious what you think about that, whether you think that’s really a pattern. And if it is, what do we make of that? And how should that be reflected in how we are doing our work?
Donald Taylor (39:58)
Technologies can be hot and they can get cold or become business as usual. The same is true for methodologies. So collaborative and social learning, which had that uplift during the pandemic, that was super hot for a while. Jay Cross’s book on informal learning came out in 2006 and that led to a of a wave of interest in that. The last at least 16 years, sorry, at least 10 years. So then in 2016, collaborative and social learning was very highly ranked. It was number one, I think, on the survey.
Jason Gorman (40:04)
Hmm.
Donald Taylor (40:27)
And it’s come down ever since, apart from that blip in the pandemic. It’s come down because I think it’s now regarded as being business as usual. You compare that with personalization slash adaptive delivery, which is also effectively a methodology rather than a technology. That’s come down, but it has…
gone upwards for the past four years. Now nothing ever goes upwards on the survey. Once it starts going down, it keeps going down. The only thing that’s bucked that trend is AI. And that went up, came down, then exploded thanks to ChatGPT. Well, personalization is riding on AI’s coattails. it has, what’s happened is people have seen AI and they’ve thought, ⁓ and I can use that for personalization, so I’ll mark that up as well.
But what’s interesting is that learning analytics, which you would also expect to get the same lift during, as a result of AI picking up, hasn’t seen that at all. It’s just had a downward trend all the way along. So there is a peculiar paradox there, which is that we’re looking at this technology, we’re thinking, yeah, I love the technology, that’s hot. I love what you can do with it, personalization.
I’m going to ignore the other thing you can do with it, analytics. Why? I think it’s because of the focus of L &D people on the creation of content at the individual level without thinking about the impact of learning at the organizational level, which is really what learning analytics is about. And I think that we have there probably in three trends, AI, personalization, and learning analytics. have fundamentally what’s the problem with L &D today, which is that we are
We are interested in the technology. We’re going to use it for something valuable, but we’re not seeing the bigger picture of what we can do with
Jason Gorman (42:22)
That’s a lot to take in. No, no, no, no, I, I, I, yes.
Donald Taylor (42:26)
Sorry Jason, sorry. quick question to you. I became an English
language teacher because I was convinced that that was a way to make the world a better place. To help people talk and share things internationally. Was that how you felt about it?
Jason Gorman (42:40)
Yes, I went into it because I actually, I was very interested in the design of curriculum that was part of one of my jobs. And then I also, I…
Once I had exposure to a classroom and my first job teaching was in the States ⁓ and I had people from all over the world there. And as soon as I got a taste for understanding that I could help people who had really different kinds of aspirations and things that they were doing with their lives, very different ages, very different areas of the world, that I was able to convene them. You know, I didn’t…
I never really had any, ⁓ I never really felt like it was me that was magically helping them, but that I could, I can set the stage for something useful in their lives. That did feel powerful. And that is one of the reasons that I went into this,
Donald Taylor (43:30)
think a lot of people come into the L &D field because they see the impact they can have on individuals. And I think that’s right. I think, though, it is incumbent upon us as people in this field to accept that it is the organization that pays the bills and the organization that wants to see the results. And so, yes, we could focus on personalization, but we have to think about how we use these hot technologies.
Jason Gorman (43:37)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Donald Taylor (43:58)
for other things at the organisational as well as the personal level.
Jason Gorman (44:01)
Yeah, I appreciate that deeply. All right, a couple more questions if you have the time.
Donald Taylor (44:07)
I’m more worried about the listeners. I’ve been talking so much. Please tell me you’re going to cut out everything that’s rubbish and leave them with something valuable.
Jason Gorman (44:10)
No, is…
No, this is amazing. ⁓
I so appreciate your vantage point. ⁓
I even in my work, I spend a lot of time trying to understand, trying to read tea leaves and understand what might happen and advising my clients to go this way or that way. But there is a, there is the effect of just being in the weeds of the day to day or thinking about this quarter even, or thinking about this year. I was on a drive with my business partner in December and we were kind of,
Donald Taylor (44:28)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Gorman (44:50)
talking about the year ahead and he said, he said, what do you think, what do you think our business could look like in five years? And I just burst out laughing. I mean, I was literally my answer. didn’t even, I didn’t even offer a response. And he of course agreed. He started laughing right with me. It’s a ridiculous question, but I do think that what you are doing here is incredibly helpful to start to understand
what the future might require of us if we choose to keep doing this work. Because I think you’re right. We don’t have a choice. It’s ride or die with AI. You have to be with AI or you’re not. You could go be a dog walker. I could do something else. There are lots of other jobs I could do that do not require it if I don’t want to do that. But if I want to keep doing this, if anybody else wants to keep doing this, we don’t have a choice. I agree with you. And so what is terrifying about the kind of immovable object of AI as this fixture in the future and
Donald Taylor (45:21)
Mm. Mm.
Mm.
Jason Gorman (45:48)
the irresistible forces of things changing every three minutes, it puts us into this kind of existential tailspin. But I do really feel like your work is offering some very helpful ⁓ insight into how we think at the most macro level about the choices we make today.
Donald Taylor (46:09)
Thank you.
I would hope that it gives people a sense of direction and what the landscape looks like and also a sense of hope that there are things you can do in order to get ready for the future.
Jason Gorman (46:19)
Now, I will try to boil some things down to something that people might be able to take and run with now. So based on your years of watching what’s hype and then fade, what is resilient? What is a resilient operational habit, an evergreen thing that a team could build?
Donald Taylor (46:26)
You
Jason Gorman (46:49)
to survive the next wave of disruption.
Donald Taylor (46:54)
I’m going to come back to something you said earlier and I’m going to draw on a conversation I had with Heather Stefanski who’s Chief Learning Officer for McKinsey. And I said to her, you’ve got a very difficult job. How do know that you’re keeping on track? What do you do? And she said, well, I look at my diary. I wasn’t expecting that. I said, well, what do you mean? Well, look at my diary. And I checked that at least half of my time,
Jason Gorman (47:17)
You
Donald Taylor (47:23)
is spent in conversation with other people in the business to work out what’s going on. And I thought that is it. And this is a common thread that I see across any good learning leader. They are always building and maintaining their networks inside and outside, but particularly inside the organization. Now it sounds like a luxury. It sounds like something you do when you’re not caught up in the weeds of your daily job.
But actually, in my observation, it is the people who build and maintain those networks that are best able to implement the next technology, run the next change of program when it comes along, have somebody support them when things get stuck, and also find out what the real issues are in the organization that need tackling. And you do that through this soft transfer of knowledge, information, gossip.
that takes place all the time on those networks. So it is absolutely, absolutely key, I think, to success is to come back to your point, we are in a human business and you’ve got to treat people like humans and build a human network to support what you’re doing. Not probably I’m sure what you’re expecting me to say, but I think I’ve always, I’ve come to conclusion, I think over the last five years, that having that strong network internally and externally and fostering it, which by the way means giving as well as taking, fostering it is crucial.
Jason Gorman (48:45)
Yeah.
It makes perfect sense. It’s completely technology proof. And it’s an absolute prerequisite to do everything that we do in our work. It has always been, will always be. It makes perfect sense to me. Thank you for that. I have one last question. And after we’re done here and the camera is no longer rolling, I will see if you have a question for our next guest. But my last guest was Dr. Luke Hobson. I don’t know if you know Luke. He ⁓ is here. He’s a
Donald Taylor (48:55)
Yes.
You
Jason Gorman (49:15)
a wonderful thinker and designer. He works at MIT and teaches structural design, written a couple books. So he gave me a question to ask ⁓ you. And it’s actually a wonderful way to end. His question is, besides AI, what type of tool or technology will have the most significant impact in our field five years from now?
Donald Taylor (49:40)
My answer is a kind of a cheat, but I think it makes sense. So my answer is voice recognition. This sounds a bit dull, Don. We have voice recognition already. We do, we do. But it’s nascent. It’s not really being used to its full effect. And what’s going to happen in the next five years that we’re going to shift, I’m pretty sure, from devices which are based on text and keyboards to voice activation, voice input.
Jason Gorman (49:43)
Hmm.
Donald Taylor (50:09)
and of course, our own output. So you’ll be talking to your computer far more than you ever have in the past. And the way people do it at the moment with Alexa or whatever, that would be the default way of an awful lot of work in the future. And that of course will be powered by AI. You’ll be able to say to a spreadsheet, okay, want to do a pivot table for this set of data, show me the trends from 2023, 2034, with particular reference to this, that and the other.
and it will do the pivot table, do the graph, make that line different color, whatever. And you could do it all by speaking to your computer. Now, the initial effect of that will be that we just do old things in a slightly louder way, boombox. We just, yeah, we could create a lot more stuff. What then happens is you start finding that you can do new things and there’ll be things which we can’t even recognize or think about at the moment. But what will happen is that computing will become
far less tied to particular objects and devices and places, and much more pervasive in our daily lives. And we will start expecting to be able to talk to the lamp, to talk to, I don’t know, the bus stop, and have conversations in ways that simply don’t make any sense at the moment. But if you imagine, if you could find something out by just talking to something, yeah, you’ll be able to do it in future. You’ll be able to look at a photograph on your wall and say, remind me, when was that photograph and who were those people in it? And it will tell you.
Jason Gorman (51:15)
you
Huh. Yeah.
Donald Taylor (51:36)
Now, it’s a bit outlandish, but I think within five years, that’s absolutely going to happen.
Jason Gorman (51:38)
Wow.
That’s, I love that. That’s very exciting and certainly not what I expected. That’s fantastic.
Donald Taylor (51:45)
kind of science fiction-y,
I think, you just let your mind run with that one on the beach at some point and just ask yourself, if I could ask something of an object, what would I get out of it? Well, that’s the future. One part of future.
Jason Gorman (51:58)
That’s incredible.
It has been an absolute delight having this conversation with you, Donald. I so appreciate you coming. I so appreciate you sharing your expertise and your research and your insight. Really, really appreciate it.
Donald Taylor (52:13)
Jason, it’s what I do, as I said at the beginning, I want to try to help other people on this exciting journey in learning and development, but I really appreciate talking to someone who’s taken the time to really read through the reports, think about what I’m doing, and has brought his own depth of expertise to the conversation. So Jason, thank you very much.