“Dear L&D” is a reflective letter-style series where learning leaders address the profession directly, giving voice to the lessons, challenges and opportunities shaping the future of learning and development (L&D).
Key Takeaways
- AI can personalize individual learning, but facilitation helps address collaboration challenges that technology alone cannot solve.
- L&D can use facilitation to support teams during critical moments of friction, especially when membership shifts and people must quickly establish trust.
- Applying facilitation at the team and organizational levels can help L&D reduce duplicated work, strengthen alignment and address challenges.
Dear L&D,
A lot is changing right now in our industry. I wouldn’t blame anyone who’s overwhelmed by the artificial intelligence (AI) conversation or confused about the skills that we need in order to survive as a profession. In the middle of all this novelty, I keep on wondering, isn’t there something we’re already doing worth holding on to?
When we talk about facilitation in learning and development (L&D), the first thing that comes to mind is individual skills development workshops. Feedback, communication, time management, delegation workshops, you name it. Over the past few years, in our efforts to reduce the information we share in workshops and training sessions, we turned to putting the spotlight on people, and their relationships through facilitation. We’ve focused on growing our skills, and I think using them even more could be our biggest advantage in this new digital era.
Facilitation, at its core, isn’t just about individual skills development workshops. The International Association of Facilitators describes facilitation as “the art of helping a group think together, explore options, and make decisions. A facilitator designs and guides the process so participants can focus on their ideas, relationships, and outcomes.”
AI is making individual development well-served, with tools that are becoming better at personalizing support and delivering it in learners’ moments of need. What AI hasn’t changed is what happens between people.
How Facilitation Strengthens Collaboration in L&D
Atlassian’s 2025 State of Teams report found that one in two knowledge workers said teams at their organizations unknowingly worked on the same things. Only 7% of executives felt confident they knew exactly how each team’s work supported the company’s biggest goals.
If collaboration is the challenge and facilitation can be part of the solution, why not use a skill we’ve already built to help teams work better together? Two shifts in how we scope our work could make that possible — both of them moving the unit of focus from the individual outward.
Applying Facilitation to Team and Organizational Development
Let’s consider a spectrum, from a narrow focus on the individual to a broad focus on the organization. The first step outward from the individual is the team. In her book “Teaming,” Amy Edmondson notes that teams now have constantly shifting membership: project teams that form for a quarter, cross-functional groups assembled to solve a specific problem, temporary collaborations that dissolve once the work is done.
This can only increase the potential moments of friction within a team, moments when people don’t yet share a working language, don’t know each other’s strengths or haven’t agreed on how decisions get made.
L&D can show up at the critical moments when there’s potential for that friction. And beyond those moments, team development can be designed as a repeatable service the organization can call on.
A step further along the spectrum is the organization. Where a team is a group of people working toward a shared goal, an organization is many teams connected by dependencies, priorities, and a common direction, or at least the hope of one. The more complex an organization is, the more chances there are for things to go wrong. In this case, using facilitation can help provide what people often need most: clarity and alignment around where the organization is going and what it will take to get there.
None of this means stepping back from individual development. People will always need support to learn, transform, change their behaviors or perform better. The argument here is simply that these two broader layers — teams and organizations — have been largely underserved, and that the timing is right to start applying facilitation, a skill we already have, to challenges that are becoming pressing and can’t be entirely solved by using AI.
