I read an article where the authors spoke of LEAN and its impacts on efficiency, increasing productivity and reducing inventory. He then showed how AI, accelerating content in various forms, will simply shift the bottleneck from production to consumption. When once the constraint was production time, resources and skill, it’s now capacity and capability to deal with the outputs.
You can see then how GenAI will make the time and cost of creating learning content nearly zero. That sounds great in theory however we have the same problem in that we’ve accelerated the creation of learning without necessarily accelerating the conditions that allow learning to happen.
The critical design challenge may not be modernizing the learning function but removing the organizational friction that prevents knowledge from flowing and being applied.
employees still need:
- Time to learn.
- Opportunities to practice new skills.
- Managers willing to support behavior change.
- Access to colleagues who possess relevant expertise.
- Work processes that accommodate new approaches.
- Incentives that reinforce desired behaviors.
Those are organizational conditions, not instructional design problems and if they remain unchanged, the efficiency gains from AI-enabled L&D may produce very little additional value.
If this made you think, pass it along.