Why Access to Learning Doesn’t Create a Learning Organisation

Most organisations don’t fail to become learning organisations because they lack content.

They fail because they centralise ownership of learning, confusing access with learning.

That confusion is understandable. It’s well-intentioned. And it’s quietly expensive.

The Good Intentions That Lead Us Astray

Here’s the pattern I see most organisations follow, almost by accident.

They say they want continuous learning. So they:

• Delegate responsibility to HR or L&D

• Invest in platforms, libraries, and programmes

• Optimise for coverage, consistency, and scale

• Measure success by attendance, completion, or access

From a systems point of view, this looks efficient. From a governance point of view, it looks responsible. From a learning point of view, it’s almost perfectly designed to minimise behaviour change. That’s not a criticism of L&D teams. Most are doing thoughtful, professional work inside the constraints they’ve been given. The problem isn’t effort or intent. The problem is that learning doesn’t scale the way content does.

Why the Model Breaks (According to How Humans Actually Learn)

We don’t need more opinion here. We already know a great deal about how learning sticks, and why it so often doesn’t. Three well-established principles help explain what’s going wrong.

1. Cognitive Load: When More Becomes Less

Humans have limited working memory. When learning experiences are:

• Loaded with too much information (death by PowerPoint, or loaded with models)

• Abstract and heard to relate to

• Disconnected from reality or impractical

…our brains overload.

Large libraries of courses, even well-designed micro-content, still create:

• Decision fatigue (“What should I learn?”)

• Fragmentation (“How does this connect?”)

• Shallow encoding (watch → recognise → forget)

People feel informed. They can nod along.But when the moment comes to act, nothing is there to retrieve.

Learning that sticks is scaffolded... broken into small, sequenced steps that connect directly to previous learning, focused on real work and contain real conversations.

That kind of learning rarely lives in a catalogue.

2. Active Recall: Learning Happens When We Use It

Watching, reading, and listening feel productive, but they are largely passive.

Learning strengthens when people are required to retrieve knowledge:

• Explain it

• Try it

• Talk it through

• Apply it imperfectly

This is why leader-led, team-based learning is so powerful.

A short discussion with one applied question:

• Forces learners to talk about what they've learned and how it applies

• Creates relevance

• Introduces mild, productive struggle

Ten minutes of shared sense-making often produces more durable learning than an hour of solo content consumption. Not because the content was better, but because the brain had to work.

3. Spacing: Biology Doesn’t Care About Your Training Calendar

Humans forget quickly without reinforcement. This isn’t a motivational issue, it’s biology.

One-off workshops and annual training days fight the forgetting curve and usually lose.

Short, regular learning workshops and activities:

• Interrupt forgetting

• Reinforce prior knowledge

• Build confidence through familiarity

Weekly or fortnightly sessions align with how habits form, not how organisations prefer to batch activity. When learning shows up in small, predictable ways, it stops feeling like an interruption and starts feeling like part of the work. When that happens, you start to build a learning organisation!

So What Actually Creates a Learning Organisation?

Organisations that genuinely shift behaviour tend to share three characteristics.

1. Distributed ownership: Learning is owned by leaders and teams, not held centrally and delivered downward.

2. Social practice: Learning happens through conversation, reflection, and shared experimentation, not just content consumption.

3. Rhythm over reach: Consistency beats coverage. Always.

This doesn’t make L&D irrelevant. Quite the opposite.

It changes the role.

• From content producer → capability architect

• From course owner → rhythm designer

• From gatekeeper → enabler

The work moves upstream, shaping conditions where learning can actually take root.

Why This Matters Now

Most leaders already feel the gap:

• “We invest heavily in learning, but nothing changes.”

• “People attend training, then revert to old habits.”

• “There’s no time for learning.”

Those aren’t failures of discipline or commitment. They’re signals that the mechanism is wrong.

Access doesn’t create learning. Content doesn’t create capability. Platforms don’t create practice. People do; together, over time, in context.

If this resonates, the next question is practical, not philosophical:

What does this look like in real teams, in real weeks, under real pressure?

That’s the ground worth exploring next, where learning stops being an event and starts becoming alive. And that’s where the real work begins.