The L&D Navigator – part 2 The practice of navigating the unknown

Donald Taylor has spent thirteen years taking the pulse of the L&D profession. When asked recently to distill today’s world of digital learning into three words, his answer was plain: new, unknown territory. This year he called his annual report Into the Unknown. And in the free-text responses to his 2026 Global Sentiment Survey, three words surfaced above all others- overwhelmed, burnout and uncertainty.

The profession has named its condition. We are moving into unchartered territories.

I left the first article in this series with a question: are we navigating, or waiting for someone to hand us a better map? Today I want to try to answer it, not by providing another map, but exploring the principles that sit beneath the maps that have gone before. And that is tougher than it sounds.

That last part matters. I want to be honest about it from the start. What I’m pointing toward is harder than following a map. I want to tell you why it’s worth it before I tell you what it is.

Why we reach for models

When you’re under-resourced and someone offers a clear framework with steps and a name, it feels like ground beneath your feet. Performance consulting, 70:20:10, skills frameworks, design methodologies,  evaluation models. These didn’t appear from nowhere. They emerged from real evidence about what works when it comes to improving L&D impact. I believe in them. I’ve spent twenty years deconstructing them, contributing to the evidence base that underpins the reasons for their success.

But here is what I’ve noticed as I study our amazing profession. We take 70:20:10, a framework designed to free us from our dependency on courses, and spend more energy defending the ratios than applying the insight. We use performance consulting questions well, then miss the moment when the room shifts and the person across the table is no longer with us. We pick up an evaluation framework, hit a data wall, and quietly give up on measuring anything at all.

In each case the models are sound. The trouble is that we hand them the wheel. We stop reading the room. We let the map do the navigating and step back.

I’ve fallen into the same trap as I’ve been talking about principles too. I’ve been in enough rooms to know when I’ve reached for them too soon – where people are either rushing past or mining the idea for something that confirms what they already believe. Noticing that gap, between what I’m offering and what the room can receive, is what led me to this series. Not to abandon the idea of navigation principles but to find a new way to make them land.

The problem with models as maps

Our relationship with models has leaned heavily into reductionism. They work because they break our complex, interconnected world of work into manageable steps. And those steps, to be honest, don’t always work in the messy, human, unpredictable systems we actually operate in. Maps belong to someone else’s journey through territory they’ve already mapped.

So when I went back into twenty years of benchmark data, I wasn’t looking for better maps. I was looking for something different. Not reductionism but simplification – finding the patterns that are always true within a complex system, so that you can navigate it rather than just follow the map (or gaps) and hope it will get us to the value that we want to reach.

There’s a crucial difference between those two things. Maps tell you what to do next. That’s their value and their limitation. The ability to spot patterns sharpen your judgment so that you can decide what to do, in your conditions, with your people, right now. A world that you can read, you can navigate. A world in which you only follow will always be someone else’s.

That distinction changed everything about how I read the data.

What the data showed

Across twenty years of research, studying what genuinely high-performing L&D teams do that others don’t, the patterns that emerged weren’t models. They were principles. Three of them. Consistent across industries, geographies, organisational sizes, levels of maturity. I’ve called them TRI — Tuning In, Responding and Improving.

I notice the mild irony of using acronyms in an article about stepping back from models. But TRI isn’t a process to follow in steps. It provides a language for something high-performing teams are already doing, intuitively, that becomes more powerful when you do it deliberately.

• Tuning In is what you do before you open your toolkit. Tuning in is about aligning with the business, connecting to individuals and grounding ourselves in the environmental reality of our businesses. It’s not a scoping exercise. It’s a genuine, continuous orientation to what is actually happening in our organisation right now. Our observations, our own conversations, our own reading of the data and the room, all matter.
• Responding is the choice you make with that understanding – how we enable and engage others to be equipped and ready. Which approach fits our conditions? What to adapt? What to set aside because it wasn’t designed for the territory we actually find ourselves in.
• Improving is what turns each experience into a sharper reading of our environment over time. It involves monitoring and sharing progress. Not as a retrospective audit. But a quiet, continuous habit of noticing what happened so that we can continually adapt and anticipate.

I explored these principles in depth in The L&D Leader, written with Michelle Ockers, who brought her decades of practical experience and interviews with learning leaders across very different organisations to test what these patterns actually looked like in practice. It was both unnerving and comforting that they were so similar to successful principles of practice found elsewhere such as the OODA loop or design thinking. What makes them different is that they are uniquely ours, firmly grounded in data from the L&D profession not borrowed from other fields. Together Michelle and I found them holding across every context we examined. 

But to make these navigation principles work, we need to go one level deeper.

The compass underneath

Two practitioners can apply the TRI principles in similar situations and get entirely different results. The difference isn’t the practice. It’s the internal compass they bring to it.

The Polynesian Master Navigator Mau Piailug* described the importance of visualising his destination and to carry a compass of the stars inside himself. He did not get his direction from a chart or a GPS. His ability to orient himself in the right direction so thoroughly developed through practice that it became instinct, an internal compass by which he interpreted his data and set his direction.

That internal compass is what we bring to our navigation, the vision of our destination shapes what we notice, what we’re willing to consider, how much we trust what we see.

From our interviews over the last 5 years, we have come to call this internal compass BOLD. This represents 4 orientations that seem to consistently keep L&D leaders focussed and on track:

Business-First, Open-Minded, Leading and Learning, Deliberate – these orientations are not a checklist of behaviours to perform. They represent a vocabulary for something that is already shaping our professional decisions, with or without a name. 

• Business-First shapes what we tune into
• Open-Minded shapes what we are willing to consider when we respond
• Leading and Learning shapes whether we experiment or wait for certainty
• Deliberate shapes whether we act on what the data reveals, or quietly file it away

TRI and be BOLD together describe what navigation looks like when it is genuinely human. When we bring our whole selves – our judgment, our relationships, our direct reading of our own environment – to work that is fundamentally about people in complex, interconnected systems.

This is where our professional soul lives. We are not L&D leaders because of the frameworks we apply. We lead (with or without title) through our capacity to show up in our own organisation, read what it actually needs, and act from what we see rather than from what someone else’s map predicts we should see.

That is harder than following maps but it gives us something that maps can’t – agency! As we hone our ability to navigate it releases freedom, permission within ourselves to be curious enough to shape a new path ahead. 

More importantly, our ability to navigate provides us with the knowledge that what we contribute is genuinely ours – a reading of our conditions, our people, what our organisation actually needs. Not a borrowed answer applied to a situation it wasn’t designed for. And something more. The experience of being valued because we made a difference that mattered in our world, not someone else’s. Not because we applied the right framework correctly. Because we read our organisation well, responded with intent, and something shifts that wouldn’t have shifted without us.

Beginning the practice

Throughout The L&D Leader, Michelle and I encourage the use of a Field Notebook – a navigator’s log, a space to capture what you’re observing, questioning and experimenting with as you move. I’ve kept one myself across this series. Here are three questions worth adding to yours as you develop the beginning of a daily habit of noticing:

• You’ve just asked a good question in a stakeholder meeting and the room has shifted. You can feel it. 

What did you notice? And what did you do with it? Did you pull the model closer, or did you read what just happened and responded to that instead?

• Which approach (map or model) are you reaching for most automatically right now?

The one you use without really deciding? What would you see if you looked at your current situation without it, just for a moment?

• What happened yesterday in your organisation that you registered but didn’t act on?

Was it a quiet thing? A signal you sensed before it showed up anywhere in writing? What was it telling you?

Your answers, in your organisation, with your people, are the beginning of navigation.

Your navigation will look different from mine

Donald Taylor wrote of The L&D Leader: “In this much-needed wake up call, Laura and Michelle provide powerful principles for L&D to navigate a changing world. For anyone planning a future in the field, it will be essential reading.”

Essential reading, yes. But more essential to develop and apply if we are to navigate to business success in unknown seas.

Applying looks different for each of us because the ocean we’re navigating is our own. The business value your organisation needs from L&D right now – that is your unique destination. No principles, however well-evidenced, will tell you exactly how to get there. What they can do is sharpen your own reading of the conditions between you and it.

Your navigation will look different from mine. The TRI and be BOLD principles are shared. The voyage is yours.

This article explores the principles that help us individually to read and respond. Part 3 asks what happens when that capacity is collective – when a whole crew navigates together toward a shared destination, each contributing observations the others might miss.

*The L&D Leader draws heavily on the metaphor of the non-instrumental wayfinding of the polynesian navigators. You can find out more in the free chapter of the book on our publishers site.