A Brief Foreword from Cathy Thornhill:
We’re delighted to welcome Josh LeFebvre as our guest contributor. While never officially a member of our team, Josh has been an invaluable part of the Smartfirm ecosystem for years—first as a client, then as a trusted advisor. His unique perspective bridges both sides of our business relationship, offering insights that only someone with this dual experience can provide. We’re excited to share his expert take on learning from a leaders’ perspective in this inaugural article and look forward to the rest of the series!
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
I’d like to talk about lies, misconceptions, and half-truths. What better way to kick it off than to feed you a frequently mis-attributed quote! The introductory quote is often attributed to Churchill; other times, to Mark Twain. That either of those luminaries said it is…well, a lie! There’s no research supporting either one of them ever said it. At best we might find some inspiration or origin from Jonathan Swift who wrote in 1710 that “falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it”.
Regardless, the sentiments here perfectly capture the state of today’s learning and development landscape. We are beholden to a number of fallacies, and I’d like to help your talent development by unpacking some of these and pull you out from under these dangerous assumptions.
Let’s Get Uncomfortable
If you’ve spent more than fifteen minutes in corporate L&D—as a practitioner or as a business manager/leader—you’ve likely encountered some “wisdom” that’s treated as gospel. You know what I’m talking about—those concepts, models, and frameworks that get repeated in boardrooms, training sessions, and conference keynotes until they solidify into unquestionable truth.
Except… they’re not true. Or at least, they’re not nearly as true as we pretend they are.
Over my years in this field, I’ve watched these myths proliferate faster than mandatory compliance training modules. These comfortable lies seduce us because they offer simple answers to complex questions. They give us frameworks that sound scientific. They provide ready-made explanations we can offer to skeptical budget holders, review committees, clients, and executives.
But these lies are costing organizations millions in wasted resources, misdirected efforts, and missed opportunities for genuine employee development.
Why This Series Exists
This blog series aims to challenge the status quo—not to be contrarian for its own sake, but because our profession deserves better than recycled myths and pseudoscience. In my own practice as well as my 10+ years working with Smartfirm, these 10 ‘lies’ have tripped up so many of our clients.
We need to be better stewards of organizational resources. We need to deliver genuine value. And sometimes, that means questioning our beliefs and facing some hard truths instead of the comfort of platitudes. In the coming weeks, I’ll be dissecting the ten most pernicious lies in L&D, counting down from #10 to the grand champion of all L&D falsehoods at #1.
We’ll explore why:
- Building a learning program doesn’t guarantee anyone will come (or learn)
- The separation between “learning” and “work” is artificial and counterproductive
- Compliance-focused training rarely delivers actual compliance
- Your “broken” L&D capability might not be what you think it is
- The obsession with generational differences is mostly marketing hype
- The “pizza problem” of ambiguous training requests leads to wasted resources
- Learning objectives often exist to satisfy regulators, not learners
- “Instructionally sound” doesn’t always mean “effective”
- The sacred 70-20-10 model has questionable (if any!) origins
- Learning styles are about as scientific as astrology (although, I’m totally a Scorpio…you?)
Who This Series Is For
This series is for L&D professionals who suspect there might be better ways to approach our work. It’s for the corporate managers who’ve sat through training sessions wondering, “Is this really the best we can do?” It’s for anyone who believes that learning is too important to be wrapped in comfortable fictions.
If you’re ready to have some cherished L&D beliefs challenged—and perhaps discover more effective approaches in the process—then stay tuned. The truth might be putting its pants on slowly, but it’s worth waiting for.
Next week, we’ll start our countdown with Lie #10: “If we build it (a learning program), they will come.” Spoiler alert: They won’t—at least not automatically.
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