What is CLO LIFT and Why Does it Matter?
Authored by Chief Learning Officers from diverse global organizations, along with ecosystem partners who collectively embraced first principles to pave the way for a more impactful future.
The Learning Forum’s CLO LIFT: A Practitioner-driven Effort to Strengthen the Field of Learning & Development
Learning and Development does not suffer from a shortage of tools, platforms, frameworks, or commentary. If anything, it suffers from the opposite. The field is saturated with solutions, yet many of its central problems remain perpetually unresolved. Organizations continue to invest heavily in learning while expressing limited confidence in its impact. They continue to expand content libraries while remaining uncertain that employees are learning what matters most. They continue to adopt new technologies and trends without a sufficiently clear standard for determining what effective practice actually looks like.
The CLO LIFT initiative grew out of this context and discussions within The Learning Forum’s CLO Council — a confidential, high-trust network for cross-industry collaboration — where a recurring frustration had become difficult to ignore: despite years of innovation, many of the field's foundational problems remain stubbornly resistant to improvement.
Why a New Effort is Needed
The central claim behind CLO LIFT is quite straightforward: many of the most important problems in L&D are not isolated implementation failures. They are structural problems embedded in how the function defines success, organizes its work, allocates attention, and evaluates value.
This distinction is significant. If these challenges were simply tactical, they would have been resolved by now through improved platforms, enhanced content design, or superior vendor solutions. Despite decades - over fifty years - of innovation and progress, the anticipated cumulative benefits have often failed to materialize. Instead, what remains are more fundamental questions:
How does learning secure time and credibility within organizations where every activity vies for limited attention?
How can skills development keep pace with business change rather than lag behind it?
What forms of governance help L&D align with strategy, accountability, and measurable outcomes?
What should count as meaningful evidence of learning impact? What defines a learning culture or a culture of performance? How do people learn and perform at their best?
These are not peripheral questions. They go directly to the legitimacy and strategic utility of the L&D function.
The Purpose of CLO LIFT
CLO LIFT was formed to create a serious practitioner space for addressing these enduring issues collectively rather than episodically or on an artificial trend cycle. Its purpose is not to promote a product, amplify a trend, or add another layer of commentary to an already crowded field. Its purpose is to generate clearer thinking, stronger shared language, and more usable standards for practice. The initiative is explicitly practitioner-driven and non-commercial, with an emphasis on problems that persist across technologies, industries, and management fashions.
In practical terms, this means four specific things.
First, it means defining persistent problems with greater clarity and less reliance on fashionable language.
Second, it means developing a more explicit and shared standard for what “good” looks like in learning and leadership development.
Third, it means creating practical tools, frameworks, and articles that can improve real work inside organizations.
Fourth, it means shifting thought leadership back toward those accountable for results, rather than leaving it primarily in the hands of vendors, thought leaders, analysts, and external commentators.
A Distinctive Operating Stance
What makes CLO LIFT potentially valuable is not just the topics it addresses, but the stance it takes toward them.
It is deliberately practitioner-driven rather than vendor-led. It has no commercial product attached to it. It acknowledges organizational constraints rather than pretending they can be designed away. And it aims to be constructive rather than merely critical. In other words, it begins from the assumption that serious progress in L&D requires intellectual honesty, operational realism, and shared standards that can survive contact with actual organizational life.
That stance is important because too much discourse in the field alternates between hype and cynicism. One side overstates what new solutions can do. The other side settles for critique without building anything durable in response. A serious profession needs a third path: disciplined, evidence-oriented, practitioner-built improvement.
Core Problem Areas
From the start, CLO LIFT has focused on a set of challenge areas identified by senior practitioners. These include time to learn, skills acceleration, governance, driving a performance culture, the science of learning to learn, the evolving mandate of the CLO, and outcomes-based measurement. The significance of these topics is not simply that they are timely. It is that they represent recurring constraints on L&D effectiveness that have remained unresolved despite repeated waves of innovation.
Consider just one example: measurement. The field has spent years discussing learning metrics, yet many organizations still rely heavily on activity counts, completion data, and sentiment signals that offer only weak evidence of actual capability change. A more rigorous field requires stronger distinctions between participation, satisfaction, learning, transfer, performance improvement, and business contribution. CLO LIFT is intended to create space for those types of distinctions and to make them operational.
The same logic applies to governance. Governance is often treated as an administrative concern, but in reality, it is a strategic one. How L&D is structured, who owns decisions, how its funded, how priorities are set, and how accountability is distributed all shape whether learning can function as a genuine business lever or merely as a support activity. The original CLO LIFT thought piece, “Unleashing The Power of L&D Through Governance,” identifies governance as a strategic enabler for precisely this reason.
The Challenges CLO LIFT is Addressing
The Learning Forum’s CLO LIFT initiative began by crowdsourcing challenge areas from senior leaders, prioritizing problems that persist regardless of technology or fashion, co-creating articles, papers, and tools rooted in lived experience, and hosting working sessions where peers can pressure-test ideas with real stakes attached. That matters because it signals an important methodological commitment. CLO LIFT is not positioning itself as a source of abstract doctrine. It is positioning itself as a working forum in which experienced leaders refine ideas through practice, disagreement, failure, and iteration. That is a healthier model for field-building than thought leadership based primarily on novelty or visibility.
We are addressing the following challenges as practitioners and peers. Please reach out to learn about the many opportunities to engage with practitioners and our partners! Contact Us
Work Completed to Date
We are addressing the following challenges as practitioners and peers. Please reach out to learn about the many opportunities to engage with practitioners and our partners! Contact Us
The Skills Accelerator - Upskilling needs to move at a pace equal to or greater than the business and market pace. This requires the ability to surge a skill as it becomes strategically critical, making a material difference in compressed time periods.
From Time to Value: Reframing the challenge of organizational learning—the need for a systematic approach to demonstrating value for the time invested in upskilling and aligning learning initiatives with business objectives.
Unleashing The Power of L&D Through Governance: Governance as a Strategic Enabler - the need to effectively govern learning, ensuring alignment with organizational goals, resource optimization, and the scalability of a coherent learner experience.
The Evolving Role of the CLO and the Future of the L&D: The “Role of the Chief Learning Officer” project is dedicated to defining and exploring the evolving responsibilities and impact of the Chief Learning Officer (CLO) within modern organizations. Recognizing the growing importance of continuous learning and development in maintaining a competitive advantage, this initiative examines the strategic role of the CLO in fostering a culture of learning, driving talent development, and aligning learning initiatives with business objectives. The project delves into the challenges CLOs face, including integrating new technologies, measuring the ROI of learning programs, and ensuring learning strategies meet the diverse needs of the workforce.
The Science of Learning How to Learn: The “The Science of Learning How to Learn” project is dedicated to defining the complex problem area surrounding the meta-skill of learning. Recognizing that traditional education often overlooks the strategies and cognitive processes underlying effective learning, this initiative explores the multifaceted nature of learning itself. It examines barriers to efficient learning, including fixed mindsets, a lack of metacognitive awareness, and ineffective study habits. By investigating these challenges through interdisciplinary research in neuroscience, psychology, and education, the project seeks to identify the key components and underlying mechanisms that contribute to successful learning. Ultimately, this project aims to articulate a clear understanding of the obstacles and enablers in the learning process, laying the groundwork for developing targeted interventions and resources to help individuals become more adept, self-directed learners.
Future of HR Podcast with JP Elliott: How Learning Creates a Competitive Advantage
CLOLIFT at Harvard: Reflections from the ‘Learning How to Learn’
Driving a Performance Culture: The “Performance Culture” project is dedicated to defining and addressing the critical issues involved in cultivating a vibrant learning culture within organizations. Recognizing that many companies struggle to embed continuous learning and adaptability into their core values, this initiative investigates the specific challenges of fostering an environment where learning is consistently prioritized and encouraged. It examines barriers such as resistance to change, insufficient leadership support, and a lack of psychological safety for experimentation and growth. The project seeks to identify the key elements and practices that contribute to a thriving learning culture. Ultimately, this project aims to provide a clear roadmap for organizations to overcome these challenges and implement strategies that promote ongoing learning, innovation, and development, thereby enhancing overall organizational performance and employee satisfaction.
The Larger Ambition
CLO LIFT does not assume that one initiative can “fix” Learning and Development. The original set of articles is explicit on that point. Its ambition is more disciplined and, for that reason, more credible: to clarify what good looks like, build usable frameworks, create a setting where practitioners can speak honestly about what failed, and strengthen the professional center of gravity around real practice.
An Invitation to Serious Practitioners
For those who lead learning functions, shape talent strategy, or carry responsibility for development at scale, the invitation here is not to join another conversation for its own sake. It is to participate in the harder work of professionalization: clearer definitions, stronger standards, better measurement, more honest reflection, and more disciplined practice.
That is ultimately what will raise the bar. Not more shiny objects. Not more fashion. Not more inflated claims. Better thinking, built with and by the people who actually have to make the work hold up.
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