The L&D Navigator – part 1

Two years ago, the book I wanted to write had a different working title. The L&D Navigator. I loved it. Michelle Ockers, my co-author, did too. But our publisher rightly had other ideas. The practical realities of getting a book found by the people who need it required a title that they would actually search for. We absolutely understood and we moved on.

But the idea of Learning Navigators never left me.

Not because I’m sentimental about a working title. But because of the idea it carries, our ability to chart a new course, even a new future for L&D in turbulent times has never been more urgent. And because I’ve watched our profession spend the intervening two years doing precisely what the navigator concept warns against, reaching for other people’s maps, in conditions those maps were never designed for.

So I’m reclaiming it now. This is the first in a series of three articles called The L&D Navigator. It is not a promotion for our book, though the book exists and lays out the thinking in full. 

This series is something more personal than that. It’s my attempt to work through, in public, what navigating actually means for us as a profession right now. And I want to be honest from the start. I’m not writing this as someone who has miraculously landed on the other side of this journey. I’m writing it from exactly the same place as the rest of us.

Facing into the unknown

The benefit of working in L&D for a number of decades is that I’ve lived through many waves of disruption in this profession: recessions, technology innovations, global disruptions of one form or another. Each time, there’s been a version of the same response. Adapt the delivery model, update the tools, reframe the value proposition. New wine, old wineskins. And each time, most of us have come through, a little changed, a little improved, a little faster.

I’m not sure that’s the right frame for what’s happening now.

The reports coming out of McKinsey [1], Deloitte [2], Bersin [3] and Don Taylor’s Global Sentiment Survey [4] are not all saying the same thing, but they’re pointing in the same direction – we are moving as a profession into genuine unknown territory and we’d better be prepared. Delivery and resilience are no longer sufficient. The organisations that need us most aren’t asking for more learning. They’re asking for transformation — in culture, in capability, in the way work itself is done. 

And the profession that might provide that support is, in too many cases, still optimising, personalising, refining… its course catalogue.

We feel this tension in three places, and most of us will recognise at least one of them.

The first is in the AI panic – the urgent roll-out of AI literacy programmes while we ourselves are still running to keep up. I’ve written about this elsewhere when I revisited David Wilson’s conspiracy of convenience – the appearance of action that keeps the real issue at arm’s length. The real question that we need to ask is not what our people need to learn about AI, but what AI means for who we are and what we do.

The second is the conversion trap – taking existing processes and digitising them, reaching for AI-assisted design tools whilst leaving the underlying logic of our work untouched. This feels like progress. It is mostly acceleration in the wrong direction.

The third is quieter and harder to name. It’s the erosion happening underneath – our roles are disappearing, our influence shrinking, our very identity is under pressure. People who have spent careers building expertise in how organisations learn, now wondering whether that expertise still has a home. That doesn’t get solved by a new authoring tool.

The problem isn’t the tools

This is absolutely not an argument against technology. It’s not a call to slow down or opt out of the AI conversation, although I value the calls to challenge our thinking. The tools matter, they have potential to change our lives for better, for worse! 

The deeper question is what we use them in place of.

When complexity increases, so does uncertainty and our instinct is to find solid ground. A model from a consultancy, a framework from a conference, a roadmap from someone who seems to know where they’re going. That instinct is entirely understandable. But when we outsource our sense-making to instruments built for different conditions, different organisations, different moments, different oceans, we stop reading our own environment and start navigating by someone else’s stars.

That’s the real danger. Not the tools themselves, but what happens when tools substitute for judgement rather than serve it.

Going back to first principles

When I was thinking about the core theme of our book, I came across a tradition of navigation that changed how I think about all of this. We’ve written about it at length in the book, and there’s a free chapter available if you want to go deep into the story*. But the principle I keep returning to is this.

The greatest navigators in human history didn’t succeed because they had the best instruments. They succeeded and reached new lands because they had developed an internal compass and an ability to read and respond to their own environment. Their capacity to read stars, ocean swells, wind patterns, the behaviour of birds, on their own and in real time was not borrowed, not inherited from someone else’s voyage. Built through deliberate attention to the signals that were actually present, in the water.

The capacity to navigate without instruments was deeply human. Ancient navigators used their bodies, their senses, their embodied experiences passed down though centuries.

When James Cook and the European explorers arrived in the Pacific with the most sophisticated technology of their age, they were genuinely baffled. They couldn’t understand how communities had navigated a third of the world’s surface to settle island after island with intention and precision. The instruments the new explorers carried were impressive. But they marveled at how a vast area had been navigated and settled without them.

“I’m going to navigate to learn.” Nainoa Thompson

That’s how the navigator Nainoa Thompson described his approach at the outset of the journey that would revive an almost-lost tradition. Not starting his journey from the place of an expert, instead he pushed off from shore into the unknown, deliberately, in order to discover what he couldn’t possibly know from the safety of land.

L&D navigators don’t always need better technology. What is essential is the capacity to read our own environment directly, so that when we do reach for a tool, we know what we’re using it for and what we’re not.

To navigate is to lead

We lead by charting paths when stakeholders need to reach their goals. We lead by making small daily decisions that keep ourselves and others on course. We lead by inspiring others to follow new routes and by creating value — and with it, a vision of what is possible.

But none of this starts with leading others. It starts with navigating ourselves. Honestly.

I think this is a tension worth naming. Many of us are being asked to help our organisations adapt whilst privately wondering whether we ourselves have a future in a profession being reshaped beneath our feet. 

This is not hypocrisy or imposter syndrome. This is the human condition of navigating at the edge. The practitioners I’ve watched thrive across thirty years of change in this field are not the ones who found the right map. They are the ones who developed their own capacity to read their environment and move with intent towards goals that matter to them. That capacity is learnable. It is not reserved for the few. But we do have to leave the shore.

Where are we, right now?

Before principles, before practices, before this series goes any further, the most useful thing I can offer in this first piece is a set of honest questions. Not to judge where we are, but to help us locate ourselves accurately in the terrain.

Feeling lost is not proof we’re navigating. Feeling busy is not proof we’ve left the shore.

Throughout our book Michelle and I encourage the use of a Field Notebook — a navigator’s log of sorts, a space to capture what we’re observing, questioning and experimenting with as we move. In that spirit, here are five questions worth sitting with before we go any further.

The Field Notebook — five questions to locate ourselves honestly

Can you see Tahiti? Our vision and starting point are essential. Can we name, in one sentence, the specific business outcome our organisation needs from L&D right now?  Not what we deliver. What they actually need.

Have we left the shore? Are we open to exploring something genuinely new, or are we still in the planning, consulting, or waiting-for-conditions-to-improve stage? Discomfort is not the same as movement.

What are we reading to make sense of our surroundings? When things shift, what do we reach for first — last year’s data, or the live signals in the room? When did we last act on something we sensed before it showed up in a report or a framework someone else built?

Who is on the same journey? The navigators who crossed the Pacific didn’t sail alone. Each person contributed observations the others might miss. Who is actively navigating with us towards a common goal?

What is our internal compass? If the models and frameworks we currently rely on stopped being relevant tomorrow — what would we know how to do? What reading of our environment actually involves the use of our senses ,our relationships, our insight?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’m sitting with several of them myself as I explore how to navigate the unknown.

Do we need more maps?

This series exists because I believe our profession needs navigators more than it needs more maps. That’s not a case against maps – particularly for those still learning the territory, they matter. But knowing when to put them down is where we’re headed next. The articles that follow will go into the how, the skills, the habits, the practice of navigating together.

But this is where we start: pushing off from shore, eyes open, destination clear!

* Michelle and I discuss this in a number of podcasts recently. Have a listen…

The Learning & Development podcast: The L&D Leader with Laura Overton and Michelle Ockers (20 Jan 2026) from 17m.40s

Learning Uncut podcast – Elevate 45: The L&D Leader: Navigating to Business Value – Laura Overton and Michelle Ockers (3 Feb 2026)

Shapeshifters podcast: Becoming “Smart Bold”: How to take agency in an uncertain future (Feb 2026) from about 24m.44s

Learning Hack podcast: Polynesian Navigators with Laura Overton and Michelle Ockers (9 March 2026)

The L&D Leader: Principles and Practice for Delivering Business Value is available from Kogan Page** and on Amazon.
**use code KOGANPAGE25 for a 25% discount