The L&D Navigator – part 3 Raising islands together

There was a moment, for many of us in 2020, when we stopped building learning and started navigating the messy world of work. The goal was visible to everyone in the room. The work, as a result of the pandemic, was urgent. And for once, L&D was on the voyage rather than preparing people for one that had already departed. Then it ended. And most of us went back to the shore, the secure place where we have delivered our proven programes and comfortable content.

The organisations that need us most right now are not asking for better learning. They are navigating transformation in culture, capability, the way work is done. They are heading into unknown territory with or without an L&D team alongside them. The difference between those two things, with or without, is the difference between L&D that is valuable and valued and L&D that is left behind, not because it lacks skill. but because it is not perceived to be on the same voyage.

This is the third article in the L&D Navigator series. It is about what happens when individual navigation becomes collective. When the voyage is yours and mine and the business’s, all at once. When we raise the island of business impact together.

The island doesn’t rise alone

The Polynesian navigators who crossed the Pacific without instruments used a phrase that has stayed with me since I first encountered their story. As they sailed closer to their destination, they would say they were raising the island. Tahiti was not a fixed point on a map they were moving toward. It emerged on the horizon as the crew’s work brought them closer, growing larger as they navigated. Nobody saw it first. Everyone saw it together.

That is what this article is about. In the last piece I wrote about sharpening your own reading of your conditions, developing the individual navigator’s capacity to read the room and respond to what is actually there rather than what a model predicts. That capacity matters. It is the foundation.

But a complex system is too large and too interconnected for any single reading to be sufficient. Your organisation is not waiting for L&D to navigate to business impact and then present the results. It is already moving, already changing the way work is done, already trying to raise an island it cannot yet see clearly. Our role is to be on that voyage, ensuring that the people making that crossing are equipped to perform today and ready to adapt tomorrow. That is when L&D becomes valuable and valued.

What Geraldine saw

After ChatGPT launched, Geraldine Voost noticed something happening in her organisation that nobody had asked her to notice. People were experimenting with AI, quietly, in their own corners, without coordination or shared direction. The experimentation was real. The learning was real. But it was scattered, invisible to the organisation as a whole, and generating no collective knowledge.

She didn’t design a course about AI. She went to leadership and named what she was seeing: pockets of genuine navigation happening across the business, and a missed opportunity to bring it together. She was given one dedicated day a week to find the internal experimenters, connect them, build a shared knowledge platform, and develop collective guidelines.

She didn’t create the learning. She found the people already learning and made their navigation collective.

Reading the system you are part of, noticing where navigation is already happening, asking what it would take to raise the island together rather than in isolated pockets – that is what it looks like when we travel with the business rather than build for it.

Field Notebook*: what is already happening in your organisation right now that nobody has yet brought together?

What the crew actually does

The navigator on a Polynesian voyaging canoe is not the captain. The navigator works with the captain, contributing a reading of the environment that the captain cannot make alone. Everyone on the crew contributes observations the others might miss. The vessel moves because of what they see together.

High-performing L&D teams understand this in practice. The data from 20 years of benchmark research is consistent: they are twice as likely to have stakeholders who share a common vision for learning in the organisation. Not better stakeholder management. A genuinely shared destination, built together before any solution is designed.

The first move toward that shared destination is a different opening question. Not what do you need us to build, but what does success look like for you, and what would it mean if we were both accountable for it? That question changes the relationship before a single piece of learning is designed.

The second move is recognising who else is on the crew. In 2003, the first benchmark study asked individuals whose opinion mattered most in determining whether they would engage with learning. L&D came in at 4%. Senior leaders at 8%. Line managers at nearly 60%. That is not a learning transfer problem. That is a crew member who has not yet been recruited to the voyage.

High-performing teams equip managers to play that role – not by telling them how to support learning, but by bringing them into the navigation, sharing what the destination looks like and why it matters, giving them the tools to help their teams perform today and adapt tomorrow.

Field Notebook: who is already trying to navigate in your organisation that you could travel with rather than design for?

Bound together

The story that sits beneath this entire series, and beneath the book that preceded it, is the story of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and how a community recovered an almost-lost tradition of navigation and in doing so restored something far larger than a sailing technique. They proved that the most human of capabilities, reading the world directly, travelling together with shared purpose, can raise islands that technology alone never could.

Pinky Thompson, one of the founding figures of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, described how the crew of the Hōkūle’a bound themselves together with aloha for the voyage. Not sentiment. Something closer to deep mutual commitment, a shared orientation toward the same horizon, a willingness to hold the course together when individual certainty was impossible.

In L&D, we sometimes talk about learning culture as something to be created. My research suggests it is more often something to be found and amplified. The organisations where learning is genuinely embedded are not the ones where L&D built the best programme. They are the ones where L&D was on the voyage, reading the conditions, connecting the people already navigating, and equipping those who needed to come further.

‘Raising the island’ is not a metaphor for delivering a successful project. It is what happens when a crew arrives at a shared destination together. Everyone sees it at the same moment. Everyone knows what they contributed to getting there.

That is what L&D can be. Not the people who built the preparation for a voyage the business has already started. But the navigators who help the crew see the island rise.

Field Notebook: where could you take one step this week toward a shared goal rather than a delivered solution?

The voyage continues

This series began with a question: are we navigating, or waiting for someone to hand us a better map?[1] The second article explored what it means to develop your own reading of the conditions around you.[2] This one has asked what happens when that capacity becomes collective.

We travel with the business. We find the crew members already navigating. We ask what success looks like before we offer what we know how to build. We equip people to perform today and ready themselves for tomorrow. We hold the shared horizon even when conditions make it hard to see.

If you came to this article without reading the first two, that is where this series began. And if the voyage described here sounds like the one you want to be on, The L&D Leader[3] lays out the navigation in full.

One question to close, and I would genuinely like to know your answer. 

Who is already navigating with you, and who do you most need to bring on board?

*The Field Notebook is a navigator’s log introduced in The L&D Leader – a space to capture what you are observing, questioning and experimenting with as you move. You do not need the book to use it. A notebook and honest answers are enough.