Lack of Ownership

Today is Connect 2025. After three years of organising this conference for the Learning Network, and four years as a board director, I’m handing over the keys. It’s a strange thing, really; you pour yourself into something, shape it, wrestle with it, and then walk away knowing someone else will do it completely differently.

It’s a bit like Doctor Who. You get to do exciting things for a short while, then regenerate into someone else who’ll change everything you built.

It’s hard not to feel a little sad about that. But it’s also exciting. And more than anything, it’s familiar.

Because this is what we do in L&D, isn’t it? We never own learning. We might own a workshop design, a piece of content, or the awkward conversations about measurement and impact. But learning itself? That belongs to other people. All we can do is invite them to engage with it, support them where we can, and serve an end we don’t control.

This is uncomfortable territory. It requires us to think carefully about our relationships with others in the organisation, about how we talk about training, performance, and results. When we don’t own all the inputs, when we can’t control every variable, how can we ever claim total ownership over the outcome?

We can’t. And we shouldn’t.

We have to acknowledge what training can do and what it can’t. We have to be honest about the role L&D plays in performance and in the numbers that matter to the business. We can contribute to everything, but we can claim ownership over nothing.

This is, I think, both our greatest strength and our biggest challenge.

It’s a strength because we get to contribute to success everywhere. We’re not confined to one department or one metric. When something goes well, we played a part. When the organisation improves, we were there. That’s a privilege.

It’s a challenge because we can only communicate our value if we’re willing to accept our limitations. If we overstate our influence, we lose credibility. If we pretend we own outcomes we don’t control, we set ourselves up to be dismissed when things don’t go to plan.

The same is true for conferences, board roles, and all the temporary things we steward. We don’t own them. We look after them for a while, do our best, and pass them on. What matters isn’t the permanence of our mark, but the care we take while it’s ours.

So here we are. Today, I’m grateful for what Connect has been, excited for what it will become, and comfortable with the fact that it was never mine to keep.