Using Design Thinking to Be Better L&D Business Partners

A senior manager in a learning organization once told me, "The business is our most important client; they have the money."

I pinched the back of my hand to keep my composure, took a breath, and started the long conversation.

In L&D, saying the business matters most because it holds the budget is like a doctor saying the insurance company matters most for the same reason. Some doctors may genuinely operate that way, just as some learning organizations do. Neither is correct. Patients should be the doctor's focus. Learners should be ours.

That's the argument this piece makes, and design thinking is how I'd operationalize it.

Here's the mechanism. Requests almost always arrive from the business with a murky description of a problem attached to a very specific prescription for a solution. We need a training on X. If your most important client is the requester, you build X. If your most important client is the learner, you have to find out whether X addresses anything real, which means asking uncomfortable questions of the person who asked you for it.

Design thinking gives you a legitimate process for that. It reframes the challenge from order-taking to problem-solving, and it gives you language for the pushback.

This piece is an early version of an argument I eventually expanded into a book. If you've ever built exactly what was requested and watched it fail to change anything, start here.