CLOLIFT at Harvard: Reflections from the “Learning How to Learn” Working Group
By The Learning Forum's CLOLIFT "Learning How to Learn" Working Group: Noah Rabinowitz, Michele Graham, Emily Lin, Katie Clement-Frazier, Brian Hackett, Meighan Hackett Poritz & Sandra Loughlin
If we strip away the noise, the Chief Learning Officer’s job is simple to say and hard to do: help employees close skill gaps and work in new ways—reliably, measurably, and fast. Everything else—formats, platforms, buzzwords—are only means to that end. When we deliver training without closing the delta between the skills we have and the skills the work demands, we’re burning the most precious currency we have—employees’ and business leaders’ time and trust.
During the recent meeting at Harvard, our CLOLIFT working group wrestled this problem into clearer shape. We debated “learning to learn,” argued about the boundaries of L&D, and got honest about where motivation and performance management do more for knowledge transfer than yet another course. What follows is the summary of our takeaways from that conversation.
We Need to Start Thinking (and Speaking) About Delta (Δ)
We talk about skills gaps all the time but what do we really mean? Talk of gaps is cheap until we do the math:
Denominator: the full set of skills required to execute the business strategy, individually and collectively
Numerator: the skills the organization actually has today, individually and collectively
The Gap (Δ): Denominator − Numerator.
Most companies haven’t defined the denominator with enough precision, and almost none have a living numerator. As a result, L&D spends too much time optimizing the third mile of a marathon no one mapped—polishing delivery without clarity on distance.
Here’s the reframe: HR’s job is to close the organization’s skills gap through hiring, mobility, learning, and so on. L&D’s job is to help individuals close the skills gaps within themselves. If we can’t see the denominator and numerator, we’re guessing and employees are, too.
Before Modality: Preconditions For Success
We over-index on training because it’s inside our four L&D walls. But training only works when some conditions are present:
Relevance: Training can only address issues arising from knowledge gaps. If the root cause of the business challenge is anything else, training just wastes everyone’s time.
Transparency: People must know which skills matter and where they stand relative to those skills. No visibility, no agency.
Motivation: People must want to close the delta. This is engineered largely outside L&D—through performance management, leadership expectations, incentives, and local culture.
Environment: The skills people need to develop must be, at minimum, not discouraged outside of training. If employees learn something but have to deal with misaligned processes, tools, incentives, and so on, they won’t apply what has been learned to their jobs.
Skip these and even great design can yield negative ROI: we consume time without producing applied skill. That’s how L&D loses credibility—quietly, by converting attention into motionless metrics. We need to start being clearer with our constituents about the conditions required to see return on training investments.
Negative ROI Is Real (And Preventable)
Someone said it plainly in the meeting and it stuck with us: when we deploy training without the necessary preconditions—no transparency, low motivation, no time—we create negative ROI. We spend hours and money, we get zero transfer, and we erode trust.
What “Learning to Learn” Really Means
We went in circles on this because “learning to learn” gets used to mean everything and therefore nothing. Ultimately, we realized learning has several distinct meanings:
Inputs: designing and surfacing experiences—formal and informal—that accelerate and de-risk the meta-skill for busy adults doing real work.
Process: noticing a gap, setting a goal, locating credible resources, connecting new to prior knowledge, practicing deliberately, seeking feedback, reflecting, and iterating.
Outputs: changes in skills, behaviors, mindsets, and ways of working; the outcome we’re helping individuals and the business achieve
All three matter. A highly motivated learner who struggles to find effective resources to learn from struggles to improve. A beautiful learning product handed to a disengaged learner wastes everyone’s time. The win is alignment and terminology hygiene, and we vowed to clean up our language and thinking.
If we had to teach “learning to learn” tomorrow, we would orient around the process and emphasize a handful of durable practices: critical source analysis, memory strategies; deliberate practice on real tasks; analogical reasoning to move from familiar to novel contexts; immediate, specific feedback; and short reflection loops. None of this is new. The hard part is doing it under the time pressure of modern work, which is why the organization has to create room for it and why L&D must pay special attention to helping employees develop better awareness and metacognition.
Implications for the CLO Role
If the outcome is gap-closing, the CLO cannot operate as the “content department.” The work is orchestration across four systems:
Strategy & Skills: Partner with strategy and business leaders to define the denominator by role, level, and horizon (what we need now and what we’ll need next).
Data & Platforms: Ensure a coherent skills graph and clean signals from performance and productivity systems. If the numerator is fantasy, so is the roadmap.
Performance & Talent: Wire learning to how we manage performance. Goals, feedback, incentives, and mobility are the engine for motivation and practice opportunities.
Design & Delivery: Build and make visible learning opportunities, of course, but recognize they can only move the needle the other three systems are present.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth from our discussion: L&D can’t own motivation and L&D can’t own denominator design alone. Those live in performance management, talent, org design, and the business. If those systems don’t change, our best work still bounces off the glass which means we need to pay more than lip service to partnering with the business and the rest of the Talent organization.
Where This Leaves the CLO
The future of the CLO role is bigger and braver than a catalog. It is systems leadership in service of gap-closing outcomes. That means we spend as much time upstream with strategy and performance as we do downstream with design. It means we measure application and time-to-competence, not attendance and smiles. It means we teach people to learn because it protects the investment we’re asking them to make with their most finite resource.
We believe this is how we move from advocacy to accountability. We’ll still debate terms—“learning to learn,” pedagogy vs. performance support, the mires of skills taxonomies—but the center holds: make the delta visible, make people want to close it, give them the room and the method to do so, and prove that it worked.