Started in the film industry, evaluating scripts for directors and producers. Moved into adult learning early — and have been there ever since. A stretch of building educational software as a programmer. A PhD in instructional systems design and a dissertation in educational psychology. The years since spent building things: training programs, methodologies, instructional teams, businesses, and one of the most-used immunization-program training resources in the world.
Most of L&D operates on inherited form — the objectives slide because it's expected, the Kirkpatrick chart because everyone has one, a build process because that's the methodology in the textbook.
I work from function: what does this situation actually require, given what the psychology of learning actually tells us — and engineer backward from there.
What needs to be done, under what real conditions, with what the organization permits or blocks. Custom training is consulting; get this wrong and nothing else matters.
What specifically must be learned, in what depth, to produce the capability the work requires.
What needs expert decision-making, what can be carried by structure, what can run on AI, what a non-expert can do with the right scaffolding. The central engineering decision.
Templates rigid enough for non-experts. Methodologies flexible enough for professionals. Control layers for AI. The structure fits whoever runs it.
Working tools, measured against real outcomes — not satisfaction or completion.
Kirkpatrick L3 — behavior in the wild — is methodologically near-impossible to measure honestly in corporate settings. But behavior in the classroom — through scenarios, simulations, scored practice — is observable, measurable, and where training should be held accountable. Most training doesn't even do that.
Human cognition — what makes learning hard — hasn't changed. The same things that worked twenty years ago still work. What AI changes is the economics: faster, cheaper, far more personalized production. That's significant. It's not the same as "learning has been revolutionized."
Training is also a vehicle for communication, accountability, documentation, and compliance — all legitimate. The view that L&D should only do skill-building treats the real work of being embedded in an organization as a deviation from the ideal. It isn't. It's the job.
Power, authority, and influence don't move where the org chart says they do. Decisions get made in places that don't look like decision-making. Most L&D engagements succeed or fail on whether the practitioner can read that.— Thirty years inside big organizations.
I'd like to hear about it.