Cutting Through The Noise to Create Meaningful Learning

How do we find learning gems in an ocean of online content? How do we teach without adding to the noise? Here's what I've learnt from 15 years of facilitating and writing about human growth.

I started my first blog 15 years ago, at about the same time I quit my job as a soft skills trainer to devote all my time to building leadership development programs centred on self-reflection and insight-based action, rather than teaching behavioural recipes. At the time, the dogma in L&D was that the way to grow employees was to teach them sets of skills rooted in best practices. The way to help grow better leaders or more effective teams was the same as helping train better engineers or software designers: give them knowledge and teach them skills.

Do you want better customer service agents? Teach them a formula for resolving client complaints and managing difficult clients.

Do you hope to grow your customer base? Teach your salespeople how to sell consultatively by applying another formula gleaned from observing other organisations whose salespeople are exceptionally effective.

Want your team to work better? Send them to a two-day course on effective communication skills. Want more trust? Organise a team building!

The bottom line was that the entire L&D consultancy field, as I knew it, was steeped in the idea that if you show people what to do, they will, and also that best practices are replicable regardless of whether we are seeking to develop a technical skill (like learning to use Excel) or a constellation of hard-to-pin-point capabilities - like growing more effective leaders.

When I first pitched the idea of creating a sub-division within the company I used to work for, I proposed rethinking learning programs to move away from ‘off-the-shelf’ offerings and into full customised design and focus not on behavioural skills, but on facilitating introspection, teaching people meta-skills like structured inquiry, reflective thinking, recognising and managing their own emotions, strenghts-based job crafting or peer-coaching as a pathway to mutual growth. My manager at the time patiently listened to my impassioned plea and then bluntly said: “No corporation will pay to have their leaders learn about their brain and emotions at work. You don’t have a business case for this kind of experiment.”

I heard a similar version of that same rebuttal right before I started the Vertical Development Institute three years ago: “There is no way to build a whole organisation around one single concept like vertical development - what is there to say beyond measuring stages and wanting to ‘get higher’? We already know all there is to know about learning design - developmental program design is not ‘a thing’. Companies want consultants to do the design/deployment work for them, not to be taught to do it themselves. Coaching is overrated - there is no need for yet another coach-training program!”

Both times the rejection became the biggest gift because it forced me to do what I intuitively felt was right, based on countless interactions with leaders, teams and clients, rather than sticking with what ‘the market’ thought was right. As it turned out, leaders do want to learn about their brain and emotions at work - in fact, in the intervening years, the L&D space has become rife with experiential interventions, customisation is the norm, and the balance of introspection-focused and skills-based focused work in learning has evened out considerably. And the interest in and awareness of the value of vertical development has skyrocketed, to the point where government agencies are training their L&D personnel to design developmentally, and companies with hundreds of thousands of employees are building their entire learning strategy around it.

The thing is, in hindsight, I didn’t make these ‘bold’ decisions because I had some otherworldly intuition of what was going to work, but because I had spent thousands of hours in training rooms deeply listening to what the real concerns of leaders I was working with were. I listened to the frustration of my corporate clients about programs that had no impact, demotivated participants, and tokenistic teambuilding that yielded no real change in how a team worked. I sat in off-the-record earnest conversations and witnessed the increasing cynicism of business leaders who believed L&D was a ‘nice to have’ with little real business value.

Most recently, I listened with an open mind and heart to a senior leader in a very large company whom I had just met. He was observing a strategy workshop I was facilitating for one of the teams reporting to him, where vertical development was central to the conversation, and came to me during the first break and said: “I’m very sceptical of this whole development conversation. I’ve sat through so many of these, and nobody has been able to explain to me what this really is. And how do you actually do it? Give me clear steps, concrete practices I can visualise, and a business case I can take to the board to show them why this approach will benefit the business. I’m not interested in the intellectual and philosophical discussions about the late stages. I want to understand the ‘how’s’ and the ‘so what’s”. Instead of his challenge being an impediment, it actually helped make that session so much more practical, and it pushed my subsequent thinking towards even more practicality in how developmental approaches might become useful and actionable in that organisational context.

If I have learnt anything throughout all these years, it has been this: listen deeply to your clients, learn humbly from your peers and then do what you think is right, even if (or especially if) you are frightened and you’re the one crazy loner doing it differently from everybody else.

The same philosophy has also extended to how I choose to communicate online and what I look for when seeking people to learn from online. I’ve noticed that the people who inspire me and have taught me the most are those who own their unique voice, choose a topic of interest, and strive to master it in depth. They also teach what they know in a way that truly honours the learning needs of their audience. And they do it first and foremost to serve, not to profit. And I think there is something very precious that all of us who facilitate, consult, teach or write in the space of L&D might learn from them.

Recently, I participated in an AI and Learning Design Bootcamp taught by the brilliant Dr. Philippa Hardman. I have taken tremendous value from her course, and I also believe she is a thought leader and communicator who embodies all the values I hold most dear. I’ll lay them out here and invite you to notice the people you, too, learn most from online. I bet you’ll find some of the same principles at play.

Value, not fluff.

I had been following her on Substack for about a year, and every single article she writes is full of substance. There is no ‘fluff’. She puts so much work into her writing, sharing the latest research on program design, the latest breakthroughs in AI and how those intersect in meaningful ways.

She doesn’t just write because she needs to ‘post often’. There are no vague or general statements in her writing, the kind of words that say nothing but look good on the page. She writes when she has something useful to say. And I know it’s useful because I’ve been able to action things after reading her content - for example, I’ve integrated AI into my program design work in new ways, discovered new AI apps I wasn’t aware of and made my own work processes better because of her advice. The little video series on vertical development I just started came about as an experiment from a use case for AI she shared in her course.

Generosity.

There is a lot of content she offers for free, truly moved by a mission to uplift the L&D field in this new AI era. She gives much more than she asks for. I’ve read her posts for a whole year before buying her course, and I bought the course because I was certain I was going to get heaps more value than what it would cost me. And I certainly did. The 50 other people who were on that journey with me seemed to agree.

Simplicity and Clarity.

Philippa Hardman, unlike many other academics, writes clearly - you don’t have to break your brain trying to cut through academic jargon to finally get to some gold nugget. She uses the right number of words to convey the meaning. Doesn’t dumb things down, nor does she overcomplicate them unnecessarily.

She avoids the pitfalls of so many other ‘thought leaders’ who love to write/speak in ways that are so abstract and convoluted, so full of pretentious jargon as to make their audiences feel dumb, thus elevating their status above everyone else. Philippa genuinely strives to help people not only understand but also apply what she is teaching in ways that are truly useful to them.

Humbleness and Integrity.

Philippa does not promote herself as the guru of AI and Learning Design (though honestly, I think she is as close to that designation as one possibly could be in this day and age). She doesn’t try to sell her course or get people to pay for her articles. In the course itself, she provided each participant with individualised feedback, promptly answered every question, patiently explained concepts she had covered before, and showed up as a true partner in learning. She offered her suggestions respectfully, honouring people’s existing experiences and knowledge.

She showed a willingness to learn from the group, not just teach what she knew. And she was genuinely open to feedback on how to make her course better (there wasn’t much I could suggest, it was brilliant as it was).

Abundance, Not Scarcity.

Philippa recommends tools, recognises other researchers and generally opens the door to other people’s work for those who learn from her. She seeks ways to make AI accessible, offers advice to optimise resources while maximising value and generously refers her readers to other people’s work. While there are others out there teaching valuable things on AI, she doesn’t seem to be competing with them, either implicitly or explicitly. She positions herself as part of a field of practice and has no qualms mentioning others’ good work in the field.

In her course, she shared all resources, made everything editable so you could copy and save worksheets, lists of tools and anything else you might need. No hoarding resources or information, no absurd “IP protections” and unnecessary secrecy.

She doesn’t hold back in her articles just so that people buy her course. She shares freely and seems to trust that whoever chooses to engage further with her content will do so anyway.

Just do your own thing!

Finally, what I notice people like Philippa Hardman do is they do their own thing, regardless of what others are doing. She’s built her bootcamp in a way that is radically different from any other online course I’ve ever seen (and so much better). Not knowing her personally, I can’t know what her process for choosing what content (or how) to create is, but she did strike me as someone who doesn’t seem to care much about the ‘trends’ or what ‘the market does’. Reading her stuff and listening to her speak, I can hear her unique voice. She is who she is and seems comfortable owning it.

I might have written this post more for myself than for anyone else, as a list of principles for sifting through the noise when seeking new learning worth my time, but also as a brief set of guidelines to live by when producing content in this hectic online space. If you scroll through the Substacks I follow (you can find them on the right-hand side of the main page of this Substack), you will find other people, like Philippa Hardman, who I believe have something powerful and valuable to say and whose words are worth reading.

Next time you scroll through your infinite LinkedIn feed, I hope you go quickly past AI-written posts, past people telling you about their latest book/course/venture, past mind-numbingly abstract hyper-intellectual musings, past gossip, past ‘inspo’ posts or senseless debates without any useful outcome and choose to stop wherever you pick up real value offered without asking for something in return. I hope you stop and listen to voices that provoke your thinking, share things you can actually use, and write for you rather than about themselves. I’d love to share who those people are in the comments - let the rest of us discover those hidden learning gems you enjoy!

We all need a bit of a breather from the noise. And perhaps a bit more courage to do our own thing, if we feel so inclined, even when everybody around us is saying ‘there’s no business case for this’.

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and certification programs accredited by the International Coaching Federation. If you choose to become a paid subscriber to this substack, you will receive complimentary access to all our webinars and a 50% discount on our long-form online programs, including our “Vertical Development Practices for Coaches”.

If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, check out our ICF Level 1 Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching - next cohort starts in Feb 2026 (now running on both Americas/Apac and EMEA time zones). Check out the Program Page for details and reach out for an interview.

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