Steve George explores why L&D struggles when work shifts faster than programmes can adapt. He highlights cognitive agility and unlearning as essential performance enablers, offering practical design ideas including messy scenarios, changing case studies, and shorter learning cycles. All to build reflection into daily work and strengthen resilience amid uncertainty.
Imagine rolling out a carefully planned learning programme, only to find that halfway through, priorities have shifted and the roles it supports no longer look the same.
At a recent workshop exploring how technology is changing L&D, this challenge was described succinctly by one of the attendees: “I feel like I’m designing for a world that is more predictable than the one anyone in my company inhabits.”
Many organisations can define the skills they need now, yet find themselves playing catch-up as those needs evolve
This is a common challenge: many organisations can define the skills they need now, yet find themselves playing catch-up with their L&D programmes as those needs evolve. More often than not, this is driven by rapid technological change.
The importance of cognitive agility
This is where cognitive agility becomes important for our learners, and for ourselves, not as a replacement for skills and other development, but as an enabler of performance. Cognitive agility is the capacity to adjust our thinking in response to change, to rapidly make sense of and use new information, challenge assumptions (including our own), and let go of ways of working that no longer deliver results.
In organisational terms this might translate into faster decision-making, better framing of the problems we’re looking to solve, and greater resilience when plans need revising – all of which are key drivers of performance.
One aspect of developing cognitive agility that can be particularly challenging is ‘unlearning’. High performance is often built on repeatable successes; processes, heuristics and expertise that become embedded because they work. However, when conditions and requirements change, these former strengths can hold us back.
Unlearning is not about discarding experience, but about preventing it from becoming so embedded that it hinders performance when change is needed. Organisations that struggle to adapt are rarely going to be short of skilled people, but they can be constrained by legacy thinking that’s not challenged.
As L&D professionals, we can support this agile thinking by designing learning that surfaces assumptions, makes them open to challenge, and actively builds unlearning the “old ways” into everyday work.
Designing learning for unpredictability
In practice, this means taking a closer look at how we design our learning, how that learning is experienced, and understanding the unpredictable world our learners inhabit. Rather than treating learning as a transfer of established knowledge or techniques, this means designing instead for conditions that mirror real work more closely. Examples of this include providing scenarios with incomplete information, case studies that change path midway through, and facilitated discussions that dissect how conclusions were reached – not just what the “right” answer was. It also means examining the emotional and practical realities of applying decisions in the real world and how we adapt as situations evolve.
This is not about making learning abstract; it’s about strengthening performance by helping learners practice working and decision-making under uncertain conditions, something many roles now demand daily. Teams that are comfortable working this way and can adapt their thinking might recover faster from setbacks, respond more rapidly to change, and avoid over-commitment to failing approaches.
We’ve long heard about learning in the flow of work and that’s relevant here too. Episodic development such as a programme, a course or a workshop has its place, but it can also unintentionally signal that learning has a start point and an end state. Cognitive agility is arguably better supported by shorter cycles of learning with application and reflection, where people are encouraged to test ideas, gather feedback and adjust as they go. This should be built into work on a daily basis.
It’s also important to consider that uncertainty is not evenly distributed. Some roles will have space for experimentation, while others will carry higher consequences for error. Designing for cognitive agility therefore requires judgement as to where and how it can be appropriately implemented. The intent is not to remove standards or accountability, but to help people recognise when stability is required and when adaptation is essential.
Reframing skills and experience
None of this, of course, diminishes the value of skills and experience. Instead, it reframes skills and experience as foundations rather than finish lines, enabling people to perform today while remaining capable of adapting for tomorrow. For us in L&D, that means asking where we’re still designing for certainty, where we might be reinforcing assumptions, and what we may need to unlearn ourselves.
At a recent conference an HR director of a large organisation said that “the window of a predictable future gets narrower day by day”. L&D professionals have a vital role in helping organisations with this challenge by supporting sustained organisational performance – not through trying to predict future skills alone, but also by enabling people to respond as that future unfolds.
By designing learning that develops cognitive agility alongside skills, we can help organisations navigate change and perform through it with confidence, even when the answers are not clear.
Steve George is Head of Learning at the CIPD
