What is the future of learning?
We’ve all sat through training sessions packed full of great content. But how much of it do you actually remember? And, more importantly, did it change what you did afterwards? Now contrast that with a learning experience that made you feel something. Frustrated. Confused. Excited. Hopeful. Chances are you can still remember that moment. It quite likely became a catalyst for changing how you thought or behaved as a result.
That difference matters when we ask: what is the future of learning?
Yesterday morning, 60 learning leaders joined us at Frameless in London to explore exactly that question. And, in true Impact style, we didn’t answer it with a presentation. We had a grand total of zero slides. Instead, we experimented.
We explored Frameless’s immersive art galleries, with each gallery accompanied by a short, two-minute Impact-facilitated activity or conversation. From there, we brought everyone into a unique Impact designed immersive gallery experience to provoke deeper reflection, blending technology, custom art, AI and human facilitation. We finished by putting what we’d noticed to a panel from Google and Deliveroo, alongside our AI avatar, Sandy.
So, what did we learn?
The more technology enters learning, the more human learning matters
We deliberately designed the experience at Frameless to blend art, technology and human experience in unexpected ways.
At one point, guests used an AI prompt to generate personalised recommendations for developing their noticing skills. Because those recommendations were shaped by each person’s previous interactions with their AI tool, everyone went into the experience looking for and noticing something slightly different.
Technology helped us personalise and prime the experience.
But the learning didn’t happen because of the AI.
It happened through noticing. Experiencing. Reflecting. Talking. Making meaning with other people.
One of our panellists said that, for her to change, she has to feel something. If technology can create emotion, then it can play a real role in learning. One of our guests made a similar observation after experiencing the immersive galleries. The art reminded her just how important emotional engagement is if we want learning to stick.
It brought us back to those content-packed training sessions that often lack the context of day-to-day realities. Information might give us something to know, but experience gives us something to think about, feel and act on. We had a healthy discussion around the role that technology will continue to play in the future. Both of our panellists described how we must continue to evolve if we want to survive. Yet, we must continue to engage our deeply human needs in the future if we want our organisations and the people within them to thrive and grow.
Perhaps that is one of the opportunities ahead of us. Not choosing between technology and human experience, but getting much better at understanding the role each can play.
Learning needs to happen in the flow of work, but deliberately
‘Learning in the flow of work’ is one of those phrases we’ve all heard a lot in recent years. It also happens to be one of those phrases that can mean all manner of things in reality.
Our panel kept coming back to two things: simplicity and proximity.
If learning sits outside of our daily work patterns, however beautifully it’s designed, it can struggle to get prioritised. If your organisation lives in Teams, Google or Slack, learning needs to show up there. It needs to find its way into meetings, communications and everyday interactions.
For example, if you’re a manager practising your coaching skills, you might learn by trying something different in your next one-to-one. Ask a question, shut up and listen, reflect back what you’ve heard, then ask another. Learning shouldn’t simply sit alongside work. It needs to become part of how work gets done.
But there’s another word in this insight that matters: deliberately.
At the very least, many of us are being asked to do the same with less time and resource. At worst, we’re being asked to do more with less. That forces us to make choices about where learning can create the greatest value.
Can we realistically give everyone high-quality, high-touch learning experiences all of the time? Probably not.
We need to understand the organisational context, using data rather than perception alone, and make deliberate choices about where investment in learning can make the biggest difference.
Doing less with less
We’re all familiar with the demand to do more with less.
Sandy, our AI avatar, offered a different provocation during our panel discussion:
“What if we need to do less with less?”
Our reframe was this: we need to do less with less and make what we do matter more.
That might mean concentrating investment on high potential talent, specific teams or particular organisational challenges. It means creating the space, time and quality required for learning to actually stick, rather than simply trying to reach more people with more things. Because ultimately, more learning activity doesn’t necessarily mean more learning.
The question is where learning can have the greatest impact on the organisation and the people in it.
The future of learning isn’t either/or
One of the two-minute activities we asked our guests to do was automatic writing, a technique that has long been used by creative professionals and artists to surface subconscious thoughts and ideas. One person I spoke to afterwards told me they had started writing optimistically about the future of learning. To their surprise, what emerged became increasingly pessimistic.
It reflected something else we noticed throughout the morning: there are some big tensions in the future of learning.
- How do we make learning deep and accessible?
- How do we use AI and enable human connection?
- How do we support learning for the many and invest more deeply where it matters most?
- How do we respond to pressure on organisational performance and continue investing in human development?
These aren’t choices we can resolve by picking one side… The future of learning won’t be either/or. We need to get better at holding both, noticing what the situation requires, and constantly adjusting.
Organisations need to perform and deliver results. But if we stop investing in learning, very little changes and organisations struggle to adapt, thrive and grow. Perhaps one of the most important capabilities for the future, then, is our ability to hold multiple tensions at the same time. To stop thinking in terms of x or y and get more comfortable with x and y.
So, what is the future of learning?
The honest answer is that we don’t know. Nobody does. But the future will only contain what we put into it now.
If this morning gave us even a glimpse, the future of learning won’t be defined by more content, more technology or simply more learning activity. It will be deliberate, experiential and deeply human.
It will happen closer to the work. Technology will enable it rather than dictate it. And it will require us to make tougher choices about where learning can make the biggest difference.
Perhaps the question isn’t really 'what is the future of learning', it’s: What kind of future are we prepared to create through learning?
If you’re thinking about what the future of learning could look like in your organisation, we’d love to explore it with you.