“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).

Dear L&D,

I’ve spent years building learning experiences inside platforms I didn’t pick. Most practitioners I know have similar stories. By the time we’re invited into a project, the platform decision has usually already been made, sometimes months earlier, by someone who wasn’t going to be doing the work.

For a long time, I read those situations as organizations picking the wrong tools. I’ve come to think it’s more fundamental than that. Most of us don’t realize our platforms are making arguments about what learning is, and we rarely notice what those arguments are until we’re already living inside them.

Every Platform Is Making an Argument

A learning platform is not a neutral container for training. Its fields, defaults, data model and reporting categories add up to a working theory of what learning is and how it should be measured.

A learning management system (LMS) argues that learning is organized into courses, that courses have enrollments, that enrollments produce completions and that completions are the primary signal of whether learning happened. That’s a coherent argument, and it maps well to some organizations and some kinds of learning. For others the fit is poor. A registration platform paired with a simple content site makes a different argument: that learning is an event people show up to and that showing up is what counts. That’s also coherent, and it’s neither better nor worse than the first, just different in what it asks us to count.

The issue isn’t that these arguments exist. Tools have to commit to something. The issue is that we rarely name the argument out loud before we buy in, and we rarely check whether it matches the argument our organization is trying to make.

What the Mismatch Costs

Some time back I worked with an organization that had brought on an LMS about a year before I arrived. Their learning happened almost entirely in person. People came together in a room, worked through something with a facilitator and left with something they could use on Monday. The value was in what happened between people, and everyone involved knew that.

The platform they were reporting into had no way to represent it. It could hold a course, enroll a person and mark that person complete, so that’s what they did. Facilitators built shell courses whose only real content was an attendance roster. Completions got marked by hand after the fact. The reports that went up to leadership described a year of modules finished, which was technically accurate and said almost nothing about the work.

What struck me was how much labor went into the translation. Nobody had decided to spend part of every week converting real learning into a shape the platform could count. It just became the job. And because those reports were the only view leadership had into the work, the platform’s argument gradually became the organization’s argument about what its own learning was for.

There’s a version of this conversation that’s about what to do when learning technology doesn’t live up to its promises. What I’m describing sits upstream of it. The tool in that story worked. It did what it said it would do. The mismatch was between what it counted and what mattered, and that was settled before anyone turned it on.

Reading the Argument Before You’re Inside It

The useful question is whether we can hear a platform’s argument early enough to do something about it. I think we can.

The argument doesn’t show up in the sales conversation. Demos are built to show what a tool can do, and what a tool can do turns out to be a poor guide to what it assumes. The argument lives in the parts nobody demos.

Ask for time in a sandbox instead of a walkthrough and try to build the thing you would actually build. Notice what the system refuses to save without. Required fields are the platform’s claim about what a learning experience minimally consists of, and they’re rarely negotiable later. Then open the reporting view before configuring anything. Whatever chart loads first is what the people who built the tool believe you will want to know, which is a fairly direct statement of what they think learning produces. Pay attention, too, to anything that needs a workaround. Every custom field, naming convention or spreadsheet running alongside the system marks a place where your work doesn’t fit the platform’s theory of it.

Holding that against your own strategy is the part that gets skipped. Most of us can state a learning strategy in a sentence or two. Fewer of us have said out loud what that strategy implies about measurement. If the strategy is about behavior change on the job and the platform’s default story is completion, you haven’t found a bad tool. You’ve found a gap that you will spend the next several years narrating in every report you write. That’s worth knowing before it belongs to you.

The Room You’re Actually In

What stays with me about that engagement isn’t that one organization made one mismatched decision. It’s how predictable the pattern is once you start watching for it. Hearing a platform’s argument requires someone close enough to the work to recognize what’s being claimed, and the buying process often doesn’t put that person in the room. Demos showcase features, recommendations travel on “good” and “popular” more than on “fits how we think about learning,” and the person authorized to sign the contract is usually a step or two removed from the practice.

The obvious response is that we should get into selection conversations earlier, and where that’s possible it’s worth pushing for. Most of us won’t manage it most of the time, though, and I’d rather not rest a case on a room we’re not in. What’s more useful is that selection isn’t the only moment the argument is open for discussion. Configuration is a version of the same conversation. So is the first reporting cycle, the renewal review and any implementation meeting where someone asks why the numbers look the way they do. We’re in those rooms already. What changes is whether we treat them as places to make the tool work or as places to say plainly what the tool is claiming and whether we agree with it.

Naming it out loud is uncomfortable, and it’s worth the discomfort for two reasons. It gives leadership language for a mismatch they may already sense without being able to describe, and it puts you on record early enough that when the renewal question comes around, you’re the person who saw it coming.

The Question Worth Sitting With

I don’t think the answer is another framework for platform evaluation. We have plenty of those, and most of them get deployed after a tool has already been chosen.

The question I’d rather sit with is closer to this. What would change in our work if, before the next platform decision in our organizations, we insisted on asking what argument the tool is making about what learning is, and whether that argument matches the one our organization is trying to make? The follow-up question matters just as much: whether the person answering has been close enough to the work to hear the argument in the first place.

Yours truly,

Brady Licht Learning Experience Designer