Where Learning Should Lead in 2026: Learning as a Force for Connection

Somewhere between daily headlines, long-distance travel, and conversations with leaders and friends across the world, I’ve felt a growing unease. For many of us, the world feels heavy — marked by division, anxiety, and a sense that old certainties no longer hold. In that context, I find myself asking not how we make learning faster or more efficient, but whether it can help us stay connected, grounded, and human. That question is what brings me to reflect on where learning should lead in 2026.

A reminder from the road

At the beginning of 2026, I spent several weeks traveling across the Asia-Pacific region, reconnecting with colleagues, clients, and friends in Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Korea. What struck me — once again — was a palpable sense of optimism and forward motion, grounded in shared effort and collective ambition. Challenges are approached with energy, and progress is understood as something to be worked through together.

As I reflected on these experiences, and on the learning conversations unfolding alongside them, a subtle tension surfaced. Not because anything felt “better” or “worse,” but because it revealed a difference in starting points. Learning is rarely framed around individual progress alone. Instead, conversations center on what organizations, ecosystems, or communities need to navigate together. Responsibility feels distributed. Progress is something held collectively, rather than owned individually.

This isn’t a cultural lesson to import, but a lens worth questioning: whether a strong emphasis on individual development — tracking progress, optimizing capability, measuring personal growth — might sometimes limit what learning can do when outcomes are inherently collective, not by design, but by default.

That reflection stayed with me as I returned home, and it sharpened a broader question: what happens when learning systems are built primarily around individual advancement in a world that increasingly demands shared sense-making?

Learning in a world that feels disconnected

Over the past years, learning and development has understandably focused on capability gaps. Organizations have needed clarity: which competencies matter, how quickly they need to be built, and how learning can keep pace with accelerating change. The resulting emphasis on skills, frameworks, and platforms has brought much-needed structure and direction to a field that has long resisted quantification — especially in an environment that continues to grow more volatile.

When done well, this work can be deeply meaningful. Skill-building can connect people to real market needs, help evolve shared professional identities, and even give rise to communities of practice that transcend functions, geographies, and silos.

And yet, a quiet paradox is emerging for me: At the very moment we invest heavily in collaboration tools, AI-driven learning platforms, and ever more personalized learning pathways, many organizations find it harder to sustain shared understanding. Time fragments. Learning becomes continuous but increasingly solitary. Capabilities scale faster than our ability to make sense of situations together.

In a world marked by social, political, and cultural fragmentation, this creates tension. Not because skills-driven learning is misguided, but because it can unintentionally amplify this dynamic. The question many organizations are now navigating is therefore less about what to learn, and more how to stay connected while learning — to oneself, to peers, to context, and to futures that feel increasingly complex and uncertain. In other words, learning’s next frontier is not just building capability faster, but helping organizations make sense together.

Learning as a force for connection

If learning is to lead somewhere meaningful in 2026, I think it needs to be understood not only as a mechanism for building capabilities, but as a force for connection.

Connection to oneself — values, identity, perspective.

Connection to others — peers with different experiences and worldviews.

Connection to context — real tensions, constraints, and trade-offs.

Connection to the future — not as prediction, but as shared exploration.

This is not just a personal observation. In our Future of L&D Report 2024, Debbie Wong — then SVP Leadership Development at BNY and now Head of Executive Leadership Development at GM — captured this shift succinctly:

“We don’t just learn, we experience together. We create cross-collaboration and cross-regional assignments for people to come together and experience together. We’re not even calling it learning — it’s an opportunity for employees and leaders to engage, connect, and experience together.”

What’s striking here is not the rejection of skills, but their repositioning. Skills gain meaning when they are embedded in lived experience, relationships, and shared narratives. The deeper question for organizations is not whether skills still matter — they do — but at what level learning is designed to operate. When learning is optimized primarily for individual capability profiles and career trajectories, connection often becomes incidental. When learning is designed around shared challenges and collective futures, skills become a means rather than the end.

Learning shifts from something we primarily consume individually to something we experience, interpret, and make sense of together.

From experience to co-sensemaking

Many learning strategies today don’t fall short for lack of ambition or investment. They falter more quietly — by treating learning as something separable from context, consequences, and relationships. Something that can be scaled endlessly and consumed individually, with the expectation that alignment will somehow emerge later.

In practice, people often acquire skills faster than organizations can integrate them. Expertise grows, yet shared understanding doesn’t always keep pace. What’s missing is rarely competence — it is connection.

This is where experiential and context-based learning becomes essential. Not as a choice of format, but as a way of restoring coherence when situations are complex, perspectives diverge, and direction cannot be decided individually.

At WDHB, we describe this orientation as Threaded Learning — not as a prescriptive model, but as a way of holding learning in complexity. Learning emerges through experience, reflection, conversation, and intentionally designed spaces. Its value lies in co-sensemaking: the collective process of interpreting experience, holding difference, and weaving meaning across roles, cultures, and realities.

When learning becomes a shared thread rather than an individual asset, skills stop floating in isolation. They anchor in relationships, real decisions, and the directions organizations are trying to move toward.

A practical starting point for leaders

Seen this way, learning leadership is less about launching the next initiative and more about creating the conditions for coherence. I believe a useful starting point is not to ask immediately what people should learn next, but to pause and diagnose:

• Where are we struggling to make sense together?
  
• Which decisions feel fragmented or misaligned despite high levels of competence?
  
• Where does learning fail to translate into shared, coordinated action — and why?

Approaching learning from these questions subtly reshapes the role of L&D: from delivering content to stewarding collective understanding. The shift is not from skills to connection, but from skills in isolation to skills in context.

This is not a rejection of technology, AI, or skills frameworks. It is an invitation to ensure that learning remains human, relational, and situated — especially as the world grows more complex. Progress does not come from acquiring more skills, faster, and hoping alignment will follow. Connection is motion with direction.

Where learning leads

In 2026, learning will — and should — continue to build skills. But I hope it can also help people stay connected in the face of uncertainty, engage across difference, and move forward together without false certainty.

If learning is to lead anywhere next, let it lead not only to competence — but to connection.