How do you design learning for a BANI world? Introducing CRAFT.

The question that never quite gets answered

The most persistent gap in L&D is not a vocabulary gap, it is a design gap. We have become very good at naming the environment we operate in, and considerably less good at building learning experiences that actually function inside that environment.

A few years ago, during a working session with the learning leadership team of a French media group going through a deep and fundamental digital transformation, someone asked a question that crystallized this gap for me. We were halfway through a program that had already taken 800 employees through immersive expeditions across Paris, confronting them face-to-face with the cheffe de la patrouille de France — the first woman to hold that role —a fighter pilot who had a great deal to say about decision-making under pressure, as well as with digital native startups, entrepreneurs, and leadership coaches who each, in their own way, held a mirror up to the organization’s assumptions about change. The CHRO looked at the room, and she said something that I remember almost word for word: “We have lots of frameworks to describe why this is hard. What I actually need to know is how we design for it.”

The question was not about VUCA, which everyone in the room had already processed. It was not about BANI, which had not yet achieved the same circulation but would soon enough. It was a design question, plain and simple: what does learning look like when it is built to work in these conditions, rather than simply to acknowledge them?

The pattern that is hard to name honestly

I want to name a pattern that I have observed over enough years in this field to find it both familiar and, if I am being honest, somewhat troubling. Every time the world generates a new acronym for its own complexity, L&D generates a new training module about that acronym. VUCA appeared, and leadership programs added a session on volatility and ambiguity. BANI is arriving, and programs are beginning to incorporate content on brittleness and anxiety. The frameworks travel. The design practices change very little.

Jamais Cascio’s BANI framework, elaborated in “Navigating the Age of Chaos,” does something genuinely important that VUCA could not quite do, which is to add an emotional and systemic register to the diagnostic. A brittle system is not just a volatile one, it is a system that can appear solid right up until the moment it collapses. Anxiety is not merely ambiguity, it is ambiguity that has become chronic, embodied, and organizationally expensive. These are useful distinctions, and they carry real implications for how leaders need to be developed. They carry those implications only, however, if we do something different with them in the design of learning, rather than simply adding them to the taxonomy we already have.

There is a problem that goes deeper than any acronym can address: the erosion of entry-level roles that once built tacit knowledge through exposure, through being in situations, making decisions, watching how more experienced colleagues navigated complexity, has created an organizational learning deficit that no additional content can compensate for, because what is missing is not information but experience. McKinsey’s 2025 learning perspective arrives at a related conclusion from a different direction: L&D needs to become an engine of organizational performance and adaptability, not a support function. Which is true, and which has also been true, in almost identical formulations, for at least fifteen years, during which L&D has largely remained a support function. The gap between these well-articulated ambitions and actual practice is the most interesting question in the field right now, more interesting, I think, than asking what comes after BANI.

Introducing CRAFT

At WDHB, the work we have done over 35 years, and particularly through the development of what we call Threaded Learning, has led us to a conviction that I want to state with some precision, because precision is what this moment actually requires. The field’s next contribution does not need to be a better description of the world. It needs to be a clearer articulation of what L&D must become, in its design posture, its facilitation practice, and its relationship to organizational complexity.

Our answer, grounded in Threaded Learning, is that L&D needs to become a CRAFT, a workmanship: a mode of working that is developed over time, through practice, in community, inseparable from the context in which it is exercised, and valued precisely for the qualities that resist industrialization. We use CRAFT as an acronym deliberately, because the field loves acronyms, and because this one earns its letters by mapping directly to what Threaded Learning has taught us.

C is for Contextual.

Learning is inseparable from the environments, cultures, and pressures that shape it. This is not a gesture toward customization, it is a design principle with radical implications. It means that the way empowerment is understood in a French industrial firm, to use an example from our own practice, differs profoundly from how it is enacted in a tech startup in Singapore, and that any learning design that pretends otherwise is not adapting to context but flattening it. Context is not decoration around the learning, in a CRAFT posture, it is the learning itself.

R is for Relational.

In ambiguous, non-linear conditions, meaning is not discovered individually, it is constructed in dialogue. This is what Karl Weick’s work on sensemaking demonstrated, and what Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework operationalized: in complex domains, you cannot know the right response before acting into the situation collectively, sensing what emerges, and adjusting. The conversation thread in Threaded Learning is not a facilitation technique added to a program. It is a fundamental condition of whether the learning can work at all.

A is for Authentic.

Corporate learning has a persistent tendency to create a cleaned-up version of organizational reality: case studies that extract the complexity, role plays that remove the stakes, simulations that insulate participants from precisely the discomfort they need to learn to inhabit. Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory named what is actually required: disorienting dilemmas, genuine encounters with situations that challenge existing frames of reference. When we designed a program for a group of senior leaders in which they met directly with entrepreneurs and researchers navigating the real ethical dilemmas and regulatory uncertainties of generative AI, without curated presentations to smooth the edges, the program was more useful because it was less comfortable. That is not a paradox. That is how transformation works.

F is for Formative, meaning continuous and embedded rather than episodic.

MIT Sloan’s research on learning to manage uncertainty with AI points toward something that extends far beyond AI: the learning infrastructure organizations need is not a sequence of programs that happen and end but a fabric of practices, rituals, shared language, and collective reflection that is woven into the ongoing life of the organization. The programs at WDHB that have produced the most durable results are not the most intense or the most innovative, they are the ones where something was built that continued to operate long after the formal journey concluded, a shared vocabulary, a way of meeting, a posture toward disagreement.

T is for Transformative.

The outcomes Threaded Learning is oriented toward are not competencies ticked on a rubric. They are meta-capabilities: adaptability to genuine ambiguity rather than to a training simulation of it, self-awareness capable of surviving contact with the unexpected, collective wisdom that emerges when diverse voices are genuinely heard rather than managed through a structured process, cultural sensitivity that treats difference as a resource rather than a problem to smooth over. McKinsey’s future of the CLO identifies these as the next frontier of organizational learning, and they are right. These capabilities cannot be delivered through content. They are built through experience, reflection, encounter with otherness, and the kind of sustained dialogue that the field has historically talked about more than it has invested in.

What changes when you design from CRAFT

I want to be clear about what adopting a CRAFT posture does and does not require. It does not replace the need for skill development, technical training, or the thoughtful use of AI-curated content where that content is genuinely appropriate. It does not demand that every program become an immersive expedition, or that facilitation replace all instruction.

What it does require is a different starting question. Instead of asking, “What content do people need to navigate BANI?” it asks, “What experiences, encounters, and conversations will generate, for this specific community at this specific moment in their organizational life, the insight, the disruption, and the meaning-making that actually moves something?” These are harder questions. They produce more complex programs. They resist the standardization that makes L&D scalable in the way a product catalogue is scalable. And they produce, in our experience, learning that is genuinely more durable, because it was built from the texture of reality rather than from a model of reality.

They also require a different relationship to measurement. Threaded Learning looks for what can be called narrative traces: how people speak differently, choose differently, collaborate differently over time. The Chief Learning Officer’s ongoing work on what it means to design for complexity points in the same direction, toward learning as an infrastructure of organizational attention rather than a calendar of events.

Why this matters beyond L&D

The CHRO in Paris was not asking a specialist’s question. She was asking a leader’s question, and the distinction matters, because CRAFT is not only a framework for people who design programs professionally.

Every organization, whether it employs a large L&D team or none at all, is constantly engaged in the act of learning. It learns when it navigates a crisis, when it enters a new market, when it brings together people from different functions around a problem that nobody knows how to solve yet. The question is not whether this learning is happening, but whether it is happening in conditions that allow it to be generative rather than merely reactive.

A business unit leader who designs her team’s offsite with CRAFT in mind, grounding it in a real and unresolved challenge the team is currently facing, bringing in perspectives from outside the usual circle, building in moments of genuine reflection rather than only presentation, is doing something structurally different from a leader who books a speaker and a dinner. They may not use the word CRAFT. The conditions they are creating will produce different results.

The same logic applies at the enterprise level. An organization that treats learning as a transaction, outsourced to a department, measured in completion rates, and delivered in 40-minute modules, is building a very different culture from one that understands learning as Threaded Learning describes it: woven, continuous, community-centered, and inseparable from the actual challenges the organization is navigating. For leaders responsible for organizational resilience, culture, and performance in conditions that are brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible, the design of learning is not a support function’s concern. It is a strategic question with strategic consequences.

CRAFT offers a language for asking that question more honestly.

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Reference: CRAFT Framework

Contextual: Learning inseparable from environment, culture, and organizational pressure
Relational: Meaning constructed collectively through dialogue and community
Authentic: Grounded in real, unfiltered situations — not polished proxies for reality
Formative: Continuous and embedded, not episodic; leaving narrative traces
Transformative: Building meta-capabilities (adaptability, self-awareness, collective wisdom, cultural sensitivity, strategic shift)