Leveraging 2022's Future-Forward Lessons to Improve L&D

Written at the end of 2022, when the comparison in the press was to the 1970s, a decade with, by most accounts, better music and worse everything else.

We'd entered that year hopeful. The pandemic seemed to be easing. Instead it turned out to be just as pivotal as the two before it, with a fresh set of disruptions that made a lot of people more cautious about the future rather than less.

This is my attempt to pull the useful lessons out of that year for L&D, rather than just cataloguing what happened. Because there's a real difference between living through change and learning from it, and the gap between the two is where most organizational learning quietly fails.

The through-line is that change is the one reliable constant, and the only genuine advantage is the capacity to move through it and come out more prepared. Not more comfortable. More prepared. Those aren't the same thing, and organizations that chase the first one tend not to get the second.

Year-end reflection pieces have a bad reputation, usually deserved. I tried to make this one useful by focusing on what should change in how we work rather than summarizing what already occurred.

If you're planning a learning strategy and want a read on what the disruption years actually taught us, this is the retrospective.