Are We Our Own Worst Enemy?
We ask the question often enough: why isn’t L&D taken more seriously? Why don’t we have a seat at the table? Why do executives still see us as the people who make compliance modules and run inductions?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, prompted by several conversations over the past week and our first internal critique meeting of 2026, where we spent time looking back at everything we did in December and challenging ourselves to re-justify it. And I’m increasingly uncomfortable with a thought I can’t shake.
What if we haven’t earned the right to be taken seriously?
Not in every organisation, and not every L&D professional. But collectively, as a field, we have a long history of boondoggles and waste, of programmes that felt good but changed nothing, of solutions looking for problems. And when we make our case to stakeholders, we often do so based more on gut than evidence, articulating our thinking with “in my experience” or “I just think that” rather than anything more substantive. If that’s the standard we hold ourselves to, why would we be taken seriously?
I don’t think we’re going to get a universal professional standard. There’s no organisation with sufficient global respect to enforce one, and I’m not sure that would be the right approach anyway. But perhaps it isn’t necessary if we can collectively commit to clearer thinking about what good practice looks like, what we measure, and how we operate.
This is something I work hard on within my team at Evolve L&D. We deliberately have arguments. We provoke each other, not to be combative, but to check that we can justify our decisions and articulate why we made them. Even when something works, even when we get good results, we ask whether we understand why it worked. Did we learn from it, or did we just chalk it up as a win and move on?
There is nothing in my career that has had a bigger impact on improving my practice than rigorous peer critique. It requires trust, honesty, and a certain willingness to be uncomfortable. But if we want to be taken seriously, perhaps we need to start by taking ourselves seriously enough to question our own thinking.
What does your internal critique process look like?
Given the current weather it's worthwhile mentioning that without friction everyone just slips up. That's not to say being argumentative for the sake of it is ok, but a team where everyone agrees all the time is not being honest.
This is a hard truth to hear, Tom, but a necessary one. You’ve hit on something vital here: we can’t demand a seat at the table if we can’t articulate the 'why' behind our work beyond gut feeling or intuition.
I particularly love the concept of your 'internal critique' meetings. Moving from 'solutions looking for problems' to a culture where we rigorously challenge our own decisions is exactly how we build that missing credibility. As you say, if we don’t take our own practice seriously enough to question it, we can’t expect stakeholders to do so either. Great provocation.