# Sharron Crawford Corle

Sharron Crawford Corle writes about learning and development, including how organizations design workplace learning, develop leaders, and use AI while preserving human judgment. They draw on more than 20 years in learning and development, as they state in their posts.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/sharron-crawford-corle/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharroncorle
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, leadership, leadership-development, learning-and-development
- Based on 14 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

They are most useful for reframing L&D operating choices, including what to protect, improve, combine, or retire.

- Best for: A consultancy or campaign seeking thought leadership on rethinking L&D operating models.
- Not for: A learning technology or AI skills vendor demand generation campaign with demos and lead capture.
- Check first: Confirm availability, deliverables, pricing, disclosure terms, and audience roles relevant to the campaign.

### Takeaways

- L&D is far better at adding than retiring, so portfolios accumulate and consume capacity.
- Subtraction uses four decisions before planning: Protect, Improve, Combine, Retire.
- AI can reproduce artifacts of expertise, not judgment built from years of designing learning.

## Main ideas

- **L&D is far better at adding than retiring**: Crawford Corle argues that the standard learning and development loop—someone identifies a need, a course, webinar, toolkit, or program is built and launched, then another need appears and the cycle repeats—made sense when information was scarce and needs moved slowly. None of those steps is wrong on its own, but accumulation is the problem: every new offering brings communication, maintenance, updates, support, evaluation, and eventual retirement, a step rarely taken. Keeping a program because it has always existed consumes capacity; a rarely used resource still competes for attention. The proposed reframe shifts from a content question (what should we create next?) to a portfolio question (what should we create, curate, maintain, stop, experiment with, invest in, and get out of the way of?).
- **Subtraction is a planning discipline with four named decisions**: Crawford Corle proposes treating retirement as a deliberate strategy, not an occasional cleanup, before annual planning asks what to add. The four decisions are Protect (what is working and worth continuing), Improve (what matters but needs to work better), Combine (where multiple solutions address the same problem), and Retire (what has outlived the need it was created for). This is a strategy problem, not a content-management one. Corle also allows that sometimes more people, budget, or technology is exactly what is needed: subtraction is a discipline alongside creation, not a replacement for it.
- **AI can reproduce the artifacts of expertise, not the judgment behind them**: The essay opens with a colleague asking AI to “act like a learning designer” and give feedback on a learning product. Crawford Corle describes a complicated reaction: the output was thoughtful, structured, and useful—which made it unsettling—and raised the question of what remains for an actual learning designer. What was missing, the argument goes, was not language, frameworks, or instructional-design best practice, but judgment. The piece distinguishes the artifacts of expertise—the vocabulary, structure, models, even feedback—from expertise itself, locating the difference in pattern recognition, nuance, context, and lived experience.
- **When AI produces the visible work, what counts as leadership changes**: This line of argument runs the other way from alarm about displacement: AI may end up helping leadership development because it forces organizations to get clearer about what leadership actually is. Writing a compelling memo, building a polished presentation, synthesizing information quickly, and making a fast, confident decision are described as valuable skills — but also as evidence that may or may not point to leadership, and as capabilities AI is making widely accessible. If the work product no longer reveals where the thinking came from, the argument goes, organizations have to look somewhere else. Crawford Corle also objects to the term "soft skills," on the grounds that helping people through change, trust, conflict, and growth is not soft.
- **AI is both an identity threat and an opportunity; the answer is the same**: Read together, the two AI essays seem to pull in different directions: one asks what remains for a skilled professional when a tool can imitate their feedback; the other suggests AI may be one of the best things to happen to leadership development. Both point to value shifting toward judgment and discernment. That is a tension, not a contradiction: the same shift that makes polished outputs less meaningful raises the premium on what cannot be prompted.
- **Design for learning, rather than designing learning**: Crawford Corle says plainly that no one can make another person learn. L&D often designs as if the opposite were true, talking about delivering, creating, and providing learning as though it were something handed over. Learning is something the learner does. A designer can introduce an idea, ask a question that prompts someone to reconsider what they thought they knew, create practice, build in reflection, connect people with others who see the world differently, and make it easier to try something new back at work. A companion argument holds that knowledge becomes perspective only through reflection.
- **Behavior change is not a single event; much of the work is translation**: The hardest part of learning work, this piece argues, is explaining to colleagues outside talent development why one webinar is not enough—not designing good learning. Behavior change comes from practicing in real conditions, getting feedback over time, seeing behavior modeled and reinforced, and having room to try, miss, adjust, and try again. A single event can start awareness, name a problem, provide useful information, or spark motivation, but it cannot rewire habits. Much of the day-to-day job is translation: helping the rest of the business see that learning is designed, reinforced, and revisited, not deployed.
- **Learning is sense-making, not speed or volume**: Two essays push back against treating speed as the goal—getting people up to speed, rolling things out sooner, shortening the time it takes to learn—and against equating learning with knowing more. Learning, the argument goes, is sense-making: it needs time for reflection, permission to notice what is not working, and the courage to name recurring patterns. Crawford Corle argues for shifting the focus from more content to whether content helps better thinking become a habit, and whether knowledge has become perspective—“not simply to fill our minds with more information, but to change the lens through which we see the world.”

## Work to read

- [What If We Built It Differently?](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sharroncorle_whatifwebuiltitdifferently-learninganddevelopment-activity-7512864257907044353-3zmw)
- [If L&D Practiced Subtraction, What Would It Stop Doing?](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sharroncorle_whatifwebuiltitdifferently-learninganddevelopment-activity-7513589941201911809-GaYB)
- [Expertise Is Not a Prompt](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sharroncorle_expertise-is-not-a-prompt-a-colleague-used-activity-7475630366645702657-PutD)
- [The Real Work of Leadership](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sharroncorle_the-real-work-of-leadership-a-pivot-today-activity-7467285131171504129-SLqU)
- [Maybe We Should Stop Designing Learning and Start Designing for Learning](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sharroncorle_thinkingoutloud-learninganddevelopment-workplacelearning-activity-7494044327241834496-AGaI)
- [Why Good Learning Cannot Be a Single Event](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sharroncorle_friday-truth-from-the-learning-side-of-the-activity-7420494903010451457-dLc3)
- [Learning Is Not Speed, It Is Sense-Making](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sharroncorle_in-a-lot-of-learning-conversations-i-follow-activity-7419744679572938752-hrH8)

## Partnerships

The eight reviewed LinkedIn posts cover learning and development, leadership, and AI, but list no sponsorship offer, partnership format, rate card, or commercial inquiry route. Prospective partners should ask Sharron Crawford Corle directly about availability, deliverables, pricing, and disclosure terms.

## Alternatives

- Shahid Ahmed ST: Choose this alternative when the client's audience is working trainers and L&D managers and the session needs to be operational rather than keynote-level. The second post is a first-hand turnaround story with the numbers a finance or HR leadership group tends to ask for: a learning platform launched on a six-figure budget, engagement reported upward in a review as "about 15%" when the actual figure was 13.8%, and then a rebuild of the operating model around monthly workforce-data tracking, role-based coaching piloted with ten people and measured on behavioural change rather than completion rates, platform evaluation by 90-day adoption, a quarterly "Talent Radar" that sorts developments into observe, scale and set aside, and reporting on time-to-productivity and capability gaps instead of learning hours. That is closer than anything in Sharron Crawford Corle's posts to the accountability conversation a client's leadership team will want to have, and it gives the buyer a speaker who has run the shift inside a function rather than described how it should be run. The first post adds a usable design tool: personas built from training-needs analysis, contextual analysis and company culture, with a stated reach of 85 to 95 per cent accuracy, and six spelled-out benefits from better trainer preparation to safer group dynamics.
- Nicole Stephens, PMP, ACC: Choose this alternative when the campaign tilts towards AI ethics and bias in learning work and the audience sits in high-tech companies. The panel post works through specific risks rather than generalities: systems perpetuating bias when their training data skews, an example of AI shifting tone because of the writer's geography, the limit that reviewers carry their own biases even when they check the output, disclosure of AI-generated artifacts, cross-checking facts across multiple tools, and the position that AI augments human skills and needs human discretion at the helm. That is a narrower and more concrete treatment of ethical AI in learning than Sharron Crawford Corle's posts offer. The second post identifies a specific market and a named offering: a learning and development consultancy aimed at high-tech companies, a SmartLeader programme for tech leaders navigating change, an inside-out approach that starts with intrinsic motivation before skills, and a reported client outcome of exceeding a 16 per cent profitability goal, with improved cross-departmental collaboration named as a large contributing factor.
- Kieran Gilmurray: Choose this alternative when the client wants the deepest available treatment of subtraction itself and can accept a general leadership and transformation frame rather than an L&D-specific one. The article is a full, referenced piece on strategic subtraction: the distinction between cost-led cutting and value-led subtraction, a triple test of efficiency, resilience and prominence, and six named methods — elimination, substitution, consolidation, hiding, pausing and abstraction. It develops the argument through concrete cases, including IKEA discontinuing its printed catalogue, Zipline's medical drone delivery in Rwanda, Estonia's X-Road data-sharing infrastructure, Netflix's pause feature and AWS abstraction, with cited evidence from Asana, Atlassian, Microsoft and the OCC's 2024 action against Citibank, and management writing from Drucker, Porter and Rumelt behind the framing. It closes with questions for leaders and a route to a book, a newsletter and a podcast, so a client wanting a strategic-transformation speaker with a published framework and an existing content engine would find more depth on subtraction here than in Sharron Crawford Corle's posts.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/