Building a Learning Culture That Lasts
From why to what to how - a practical guide to making learning part of how your organization operates.
Lead Authors: Chris Dunford, Chara Balasubramaniam, and Christine Murphy, as part of The Learning Forum’s CLO LIFT network. With thanks to Brian Hackett, Meighan Hackett Poritz, and Noah G. Rabinowitz.
This article summarizes the lead author’s three-part LinkedIn series and brings together three questions we’ve explored through CLO LIFT: WHY learning culture has never mattered more, WHAT enables it to thrive, and HOW to build and sustain one.
Post | LinkedIn: WHY learning culture has never mattered more.
Post | LinkedIn: WHAT creates the conditions for a learning culture to thrive?
Post | LinkedIn: HOW: Getting concrete – building a thriving learning culture
The biggest competitive advantage in the AI era is not technology; it’s learning faster than everyone else.
When the FIFA World Cup is in full swing, it’s a timely reminder that the best teams don’t prepare for a four-week tournament every four years. They build habits of learning, adapting and improving every day. In the age of AI, where the game is changing faster than ever, businesses aren’t so different. For us, a learning culture is simply an environment where people and organisations learn new skills faster than the world around them changes. It’s no longer a nice-to-have. It’s becoming one of the biggest competitive advantages an organization can have.
Part 1: Why learning culture has never mattered more
As we’ve reflected on this, one thing keeps coming up: learning becomes much easier when it’s connected to purpose.
As one of us (Chris Dunford) puts it: “I feel most energized and driven, and I perform at my best, when I am learning. Every role, project, event, and business trip is an opportunity to be curious and to develop and grow. It’s as simple as that - a philosophy I try to pass on to my two sons, who are rapidly approaching adulthood.”
Learning isn’t an obligation. It’s fuel. When people connect learning to what matters most to them, curiosity becomes natural, and growth becomes part of everyday life. This isn’t a new idea, but it is more important than ever when building a learning culture.
AI, market shifts and geopolitical uncertainty mean standing still isn’t an option. The organisations that succeed will be the ones that learn and adapt the fastest. Success comes from collective learning rather than individual brilliance. Thousands of small improvements, shared across teams, compound into lasting advantage. Here’s one example of how Bayer drove innovation at scale through learning.
Implementing a learning culture isn’t about more training courses or higher completion rates. It’s about creating an environment where curiosity is encouraged, experimentation is safe and learning happens in the flow of work. We think of it as “learning at match speed”: building learning agility, trying new ideas quickly and treating setbacks as opportunities to improve, using data and AI to continually refine performance to learn, adapt and evolve.
Part 2: What creates the conditions for a learning culture to thrive?
If the “why” is clear, the next question is much more practical: what actually enables a learning culture to thrive? Five conditions stand out.
1. Focus on ‘learning in the flow of work’
Learning culture isn’t owned by Learning & Development. L&D enables it, but leaders create it and everyone sustains it. The strongest cultures are those where leaders visibly model curiosity, teams share learning openly and learning becomes simply “how we work around here.” There needs to be a clear and visible connection between learning and better business outcomes. When people can see how learning improves customer value, performance and growth, learning stops feeling like extra work and starts feeling like part of the job.
Netflix, for example, has built a high-performance learning culture anchored in “freedom and responsibility - highly aligned, loosely controlled,” where there are minimal rules but a focus instead on continuous feedback, transparency, and maximum ownership and accountability to push employees to constantly grow and adapt.
2. Create psychological safety
Technology is playing an increasingly powerful role in personalizing and scaling learning, but it’s the human elements — psychological safety, shared ownership, and storytelling — that really bring it to life. None of this happens without psychological safety. People rarely experiment if mistakes are punished, and they rarely share what they’ve learned if vulnerability is seen as a weakness.
High-performing teams don’t just generate learning; they share learning at pace. One lesson from a customer, one experiment or one setback becomes shared knowledge that improves the whole organization. As the World Cup progresses into the knock-out stages, the teams that make it to the latter stages will be the ones who learn, adapt, and innovate quickly to achieve the best possible outcome.
3. Make continuous learning and experimentation the norm
At the same time, familiar barriers persist. Learning is often still seen as a ‘nice to have,’ something that happens “after hours,” and leadership commitment is patchy at best. There’s also often a lack of clarity around which skills really matter for the future, which makes it harder for people to prioritize their development. What’s encouraging, though, is how organisations are starting to tackle these challenges head-on.
Amazon’s relentless focus on ‘Day 1’ thinking encourages employees to ‘Learn and be curious: leaders are never done learning,’ where continuous learning is an ongoing expectation, not a development programme. Experimentation, customer obsession, and fast feedback loops make learning a daily operating discipline, not a one-off, periodic activity.
4. Measure what matters
Then there’s the question we kept coming back to: how do you know if efforts to embed a learning culture are actually working? Traditional metrics like learning hours and programme completions only tell a fraction of the story. The organisations making the most progress are looking much more broadly — at how learning is driving skill acquisition, behaviour change, client impact and business outcomes, and whether people feel encouraged to experiment, reflect and share.
Microsoft’s move from ‘know-it-all’ to ‘learn-it-all’ shows that learning is not about activity alone, but about collaboration, experimentation and continuous improvement. A real learning culture isn’t defined by what’s offered -it’s defined by individual and collective behaviour.
5. Build the right behaviors
The strongest learning cultures deliberately create moments to pause, reflect and ask, “What did we learn, and what will we do differently next time?” Without reflection, experience doesn’t automatically become learning.
A thriving learning culture isn’t defined by the learning platform you buy or the number of courses people complete. It’s defined by the behaviours people demonstrate every day: asking better questions, sharing what they’ve learned, experimenting safely, reflecting honestly, and helping others improve. Those small behaviours compound over time into something much bigger than any learning programme can deliver.
Next up - How to build one: a practical framework
So how do leaders intentionally create those behaviours? A learning culture is not a straightforward build. It is a complex behavioural system that supports continuous skill adaptation at scale. It reinforces learning daily, not episodically. And it requires an ecosystem of enablers:
• Leaders who are willing to visibly seek, apply and share new knowledge. Curiosity and reflection are normalised.
• Employees who are intrinsically motivated and/or incentivised to grow and experiment. Learning is tied to aspiration and identity, not compliance.
• Structure which embraces cross-team collaboration and talent mobility for diverse perspectives. People feel safe to challenge ideas and knowledge flows across boundaries.
• Enabling systems and processes that provide personalised learning resources, workflow integration (delivered in small, contextual ways) and incentives for growth.
It is clearly worth the effort. In Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends Report, researchers found that organizations that successfully increase the capacity of workers to grow personally, use their imagination, and think deeply are 1.8 times more likely to report better financial results.
Part 3: Getting concrete – building a thriving learning culture
The Learning Culture Playbook: five moves
1. Paint the picture. Begin by defining what good looks like — what does learning behaviour look like in your organisation? Do you expect people to:
Set regular (micro) development goals
Conduct frequent tiny experiments
Teach and mentor others
Share feedback with colleagues
Seek new experiences regularly
2. Rewire the work. Next, consider how you would redesign daily workflows to support those behaviours on the job. The key is that development becomes part of work, not adjacent to it. For instance:
Create and embed a project debrief methodology (after each milestone, determine what worked, what didn’t, what we can learn, what we will adjust)
Set expectations that shadowing is encouraged — invite leaders “+1” to key meetings
Cement the white space for reflection (e.g. calendar blocks, meeting invites with reflection time embedded)
Expect development goal setting frequently vs. annually — track micro learning goals
3. Spark the why. Third, activate personal purpose and motivation. Help employees connect learning to their growth, their rewards, or their passion for their work. Show them how enhanced skills can lead to improved performance and career mobility. Ideas to try:
A “Got Learning?” campaign — show examples of key leaders and how their careers relied on learning
Establish a reward pool for experimentation
Set an expectation that promotions require demonstrated learning engagement (teaching, mentoring, etc.)
Consider your organisational purpose and values — understand and share how learning supports those values
4. Power the system. Fourth, build enabling infrastructure. This is a longer-term action item but is important to walk the talk. Consider your skills infrastructure, knowledge-sharing systems, AI-enabled learning tools, or custom agents built to allow speed, visibility and accessibility of learning.
Include everyday access to learning libraries, policies and proprietary thoughtware — allow these to surface in day-to-day work systems (Teams, Microsoft 365, Slack, etc.)
Establish mobility platforms to enable people to participate in cross-team projects and try new things regularly
5. Learn faster. Finally, assess and iterate. Identify the right KPIs — e.g. increased product and process innovation, employee engagement, performance improvements, learning participation — measure them regularly, and course correct as needed. And throughout, remember core change management principles: leadership engagement, storytelling and incentives to ensure learners are using the new tools available to them.
Winning Culture
We hope this series has been helpful to the business and learning community. The FIFA World Cup crowns one champion, but every organisation can build a winning culture. We’d love to hear what’s worked for you and what lessons you’ve learned along the way.
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