Why Do Traditional Learning Programs Fail? How Can ‘Agile L&D’ Fix Your Skills Gap?

Want to Build a T-Shaped Team? How Can Treating Employee Experience as a Product Drive Performance?

Transform your organizational learning with Natal Dank’s Agile L&D. Learn how to treat employee experience like a product, use T-shaped teams to break silos, and apply the ‘plan, do, review’ cycle to close skills gaps faster than ever before.

Stop building training programs nobody uses—read the full summary below to master the 4-step Agile cycle that guarantees your L&D strategy delivers real business value.

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Agile methodologies expert Natal Dank posits that hybrid working and AI integration lie at the heart of Agile transformation for L&D. She explains how Agile experimentation encourages quick learning and adaptation, which fuel organizational change; how Agile’s focus on flexibility, customer-centric value, prototyping, and continuous feedback fosters resilience; and why embracing Agile’s cycle of “planning, doing, reviewing, and adapting” ensures incremental value delivery. When L&D focuses on user experiences and empathy, Dank writes, it uncovers solutions that address real business needs.

Take-Aways

• L&D and people-focused strategies demand Agile transformation.
• Agile focuses on flexibility and customer-centric value.
• Agile’s “planning, doing, reviewing, and adapting” cycle — fueled by customer feedback — ensures incremental value delivery.
• When applying Agile within L&D, view the employee experience as a product.
• Apply human-centered design principles.
• Field “T-shaped” teams to break through traditional silos in L&D.
• Run small experiments to fail fast, learn, and adjust.
• Measure progress and track impact.

Summary

L&D and people-focused strategies demand Agile transformation.

Today’s competitive, disrupted, and digitalized business landscape is transforming employee learning, career development, and upskilling into essential strategic assets. This shift demands a blend of learning design, data utilization, digital capabilities, and people skills. Modern challenges, such as hybrid working, AI integration, employee well-being, inclusion, and persistent skills gaps, form the core of the organizational strategy.

“Only by letting go of the traditional Taylorist, industrial mentality and embracing business agility can L&D and people professionals begin to co-create the answers to these complex organizational challenges.”

The Agile methodology, which helps companies solve complex problems and adapt to volatile markets, plays a crucial role in transforming organizations. Agile principles, such as product-led design, homocentric approaches, “T-shaped people” and teams, experimentation, and impactful delivery, drive L&D and teams to create rich employee experiences. This approach shifts organizations from siloed models to multifunctional teams skilled in “human-centered design,” experimentation, and data analytics, thus fostering agility and resilience.

Agile focuses on flexibility and customer-centric value.

Agile emphasizes “customer-centricity,” including, for L&D, workers — learners — clients — internal or external entities who commission learning — and other end users, suppliers, contractors, future talent, community members, and the environment.

Agile delivers iterative value through prototyping, experimentation, and ongoing customer feedback. The Agile Manifesto outlines four core values, twelve principles, and three core beliefs. The values include prioritizing individuals and interactions over processes and tools; valuing working prototypes over comprehensive documentation; favoring customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and embracing change over rigid planning.

“[Agile is] about getting really close to the customer, our employees, and the business and understanding their pains, wants, and needs.” (Danny Seals, founder of Knot and VP of Employee Innovation, Listening and Effectiveness at RAKBANK)

The Agile Manifesto’s twelve principles guide daily practices for L&D and people teams. They emphasize delighting customers by delivering value early and often, adapting to changing requirements at any stage, and delivering value frequently — in short cycles — depending on customer feedback. Agile promotes sustainable work rhythms, continuous improvement, simplicity, self-originating teams, and regular reflection among Agile teams, ensuring that progress aligns with delivered value and fosters ongoing enhancement of agility and efficiency.

The Agile mindset is rooted in three core beliefs related to complexity, people, and proactivity. Agile takes complexity as a given, encouraging organizations to set aside structures and processes that hinder real-time adaptability. It promotes a culture in which collaborative, self-organizing teams tackle multifaceted issues via experimentation: “learning by doing.” Extending these principles throughout the organization supports a holistic, evolving approach to growth and improvement, powered by continuous feedback and learning.

Agile’s “planning, doing, reviewing, and adapting” cycle — fueled by customer feedback — ensures incremental value delivery.

Start with a minimum viable product (MVP), a light but functioning prototype of an envisioned course. Agile teams can then iterate based on data and customer feedback drawn from the MVP. Integrate Agile with design thinking — which considers the human experience of work in design — to build a toolkit of L&D practices tailored to your organization’s specific “contexts, needs, and values.”

Agility emphasizes being responsive and adaptable in planning. Agile cycles typically last one to two weeks and rarely exceed a month. They include short, daily stand-up meetings called “scrums,” during which team members provide updates and can seek help. When planning cycles run too long, teams risk their goals and solutions running afoul of budget changes, new regulatory frameworks, employee turnover, market alterations, and more. Short cycles prevent teams from going too far down the wrong paths and allow L&D and people teams to adapt to potential changes.

“It is much better to learn fast and fail cheaply so you can quickly reprioritize or pivot direction than to slog away at something for months, even years, only to end in disappointment.”

The Agile cycle of planning, doing, reviewing, and adapting helps the team and organization iterate toward better L&D outcomes. To plan and estimate commitments, divide work into two categories: “Business as Usual” (BAU) and project work. In teams, manage work through a monthly cycle with weekly check-ins, monthly reviews, retrospectives, and quarterly strategy sessions. Regular team retrospectives foster psychological safety and a culture of ongoing improvement. They also offer team members a forum for discussion.

When applying Agile within L&D, view the employee experience as a product.

This product mindset and approach encompasses various elements, including talent attraction, recruitment, hiring, onboarding, workplace facilities, career development, team performance, progression, pulse feedback surveys, exits, and alumni relations. Viewing people experience as a product enables L&D and people teams to define, measure, and deliver value against tangible outcomes. As with any product, address specific problems for the customer: Identify and prioritize these issues to ensure your product provides real solutions. To deliver business value, identify problems within the workflow and address the skills, knowledge, and behaviors you need to overcome these challenges.

“By viewing people experience as your product, you can better define, measure and deliver value as an L&D or people function.”

Conduct a strategic analysis to build a business case for securing stakeholder support. Evaluate the challenge’s value versus effort by comparing it to other projects. Identify value drivers that relate to business benefits, customer impact, and employee metrics through a cost-benefit analysis. Begin with high-level customer descriptions and identify constraints using tools like the business challenge canvas. Then, describe the business problem and its effect on the firm, such as risk or cost, and articulate the business, customer and employee value you would create if you solved the problem. For example, many project leaders use the business challenge canvas to guide initial exploratory discussions with relevant HR directors, HR business partners, and other support department heads.

In the research phase, apply design thinking to uncover user problems and test solutions quickly within a one- to four-week sprint. From your initial discussions with customers, develop a product vision by estimating the project scope and creating an initial backlog, ensuring stakeholder alignment and budget approval. Transition to incremental development, applying Agile principles and maintaining a consistent cadence of planning, review, and retrospectives.

Manage team capacity by focusing on one problem at a time. Consider your pace of structured sprints and dedicated project days: days where the team works on deliverables without interruption. Plan for ongoing product maintenance, either by collaborating with an operations team or managing it within your role. Design products for minimal future administrative work.

Apply human-centered design principles.

Human-centered design focuses on creating desirable people products that align with your business context. Human-centered design — as an overarching philosophy in Agile L&D — shifts focus from personal assumptions to understanding diverse perspectives. This change enables the creation of tailored solutions that enhance employee experiences and address workplace and societal challenges. Combine design thinking with human-centered design, starting with empathy for the end user and researching customer needs. End with ideation and prototyping to integrate people’s needs with technological possibilities.

“Human-centered design implies that no matter the problem, all solutions start and end with a deep empathy for people and their unmet needs.”

Focus on user experiences and continuous iterating to build inclusive solutions that map to what people need and can use. This approach improves performance outcomes and prevents unconscious developer/designer bias. To effectively implement human-centered design, three research methods should be applied: develop and validate customer personas; map and evaluate the employee journey; and integrate insights from existing data, such as worker turnover and exit interviews.

Field “T-shaped” teams to break through traditional silos in L&D.

A T-shaped professional combines broad general skills, represented by the horizontal part of the T, with deep expertise in specific areas, represented by the vertical aspect. General skills provide flexibility across various business scenarios; specialties offer in-depth knowledge and leadership in particular fields. This approach integrates generalist and specialist capabilities to adapt and respond effectively to complex environments.

T-shaped people form T-shaped teams. By ensuring you have the necessary skills within the L&D team from the outset — teams composed of members with broad and deep skills — you will ensure your teams are equipped to tackle diverse business challenges, streamline processes, and address evolving needs.

“T-shaped teams can take on a wide range of people-related business problems. This team also perfectly illustrates the Agile goal of having all the required skills in the team to get the whole job done.”

T-shaped individuals and L&D teams are more able to address complex problems than can functional silos. They foster a more integrated approach to achieving desired, product-led outcomes. Roles in these L&D teams include Product Owners, Agile Delivery Leads, People Portfolio Managers, Agile Coaches, and UX Researchers.

Run small experiments to fail fast, learn, and adjust.

Agile experimentation relies on failing fast to accelerate learning. Many L&D and people professionals find failure unsettling — an aversion stemming from a preference for predictability and control. This feeling leads to a reluctance to experiment unless outcomes are virtually guaranteed. However, you must embrace experimentation if you hope to move beyond mere opinions about what might work and confidently drive organizational change.

“It’s only through experimentation that you can rise above opinion and hearsay and confidently recommend organizational change.”

An experiment involves testing a hypothesis cheaply and safely, allowing for quick and manageable failures. Develop your hypotheses about what might work by making informed guesses based on preliminary evidence. Test those hypotheses through experimentation. Be mindful of biases that could affect the results.

Measure progress and track impact.

Implement a continuous feedback loop to ensure your product, initiative, or solution delivers its desired outcomes. Track whether the product addresses the problem over time by engaging in ongoing data collection and analysis aligned with Agile cycles. Maintain a persistent focus on incremental improvements; this results in a sustainable flow of value. By continuously assessing business performance and understanding the outcomes, you can determine if your effort solved the problem and generated the anticipated value.

“Only by understanding the outcome do we know if the activity and output were worth the effort.”

Measurement of value should align with the Agile cycle. Your L&D and people strategy should articulate how you will create value by addressing customer problems. To determine the degree to which you are solving customer problems, focus on “EXO metrics,” by combining employee experience data — such as engagement scores or retention — with operational and business data — such as customer net promoter scores or lead-to-customer conversion ratios.

About the Author

L&D expert Natal Dank is known for her innovative approach to integrating Agile methodologies into people strategies. She also cowrote Agile HR with Riina Hellstrom.