Sharron Crawford Corle

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?).

Three resources addressing essentially the same need still leave people to decide which one to use.

• The post closes by suggesting annual planning replace “What should we add next year?” with “What have we earned the right to stop doing?”
• Legitimate reasons include changed need, a better alternative, low use, or an effort-to-value mismatch—not age or novelty.

The earlier piece announces a months-long series questioning the assumptions beneath L&D practice; the subtraction post turns that premise into a specific method.

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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.

The post’s closing question—what have we earned the right to stop doing—and its list of legitimate reasons to retire something. Age and the arrival of something more exciting are not among them.

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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.

Corle demonstrates judgment through specific situations: noticing when something is technically sound but cognitively overwhelming; recognizing when accurate content will not move a learner; sensing when a well-designed activity asks too much of the audience; and knowing when to follow the model or break it. The closing question asks readers which part of their expertise is hardest to put into a prompt.

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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.

What remains shows up in observable behaviors: helping a team navigate uncertainty, knowing when to push and when to listen, noticing who has not spoken yet, making values-based decisions when the data points in several directions, and developing other people. The essay concludes that the AI era may reward leaders who discern the most, not those who produce the most.

After writing about AI and learning agility for several weeks, the author explicitly pivots to leadership development and stays with it.

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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.

The colleague’s AI-generated learning-design feedback on one side; the observation that a polished deck no longer tells you what it used to on the other.

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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.

The architect-versus-gardener metaphor: rather than constructing knowledge one course at a time, prepare the soil, plant something, create the right conditions, and give it room, attention, and time—without doing the growing. A related essay describes the closing reminder used in sessions: there is no learning without reflection.

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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.

The recurring requests the post addresses—“Can we do a webinar on this? Could a training knock this out?”—and its closing question: what behavior are we asking to change without changing anything around it?

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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.”

Leaders who can explain every leadership model but struggle to lead through uncertainty; people who know the principles of feedback but avoid a conversation they need to have; and others who cannot name a theory but consistently help people grow because they have developed judgment about what the moment requires. The closing question asks L&D readers what kind of thinking their learning helps people practice over time.

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This post introduces the question Sharron Crawford Corle keeps returning to and gives newcomers the vocabulary the other posts assume.

Sharron Crawford Corle walks through the standard L&D loop: someone identifies a need, a course, webinar, toolkit, resource, or program gets built and launched, and then another need appears.

• The cycle repeats.
• None of this is called wrong, but the result is accumulation—and the promotion, maintenance, updating, and quiet uncertainty about whether anyone still uses it.
• The post argues that the real question is no longer what to create next, but how to operate differently: what to create, curate, maintain, stop, experiment with, invest in, and get out of the way of.
• These are portfolio questions, not content questions.
• The push to reconsider comes from changed conditions, not from past practice being a mistake.

For brands planning a campaign

A keynote or advisory engagement can open with this framing: it gives the audience a shared question before offering a prescription. Sharron Crawford Corle is positioned as someone who reframes the question, not someone selling a new program.

The post opens with a blunt observation: L&D is good at adding, but less practiced at retiring.

• Everything that stays carries costs: a program kept out of habit consumes capacity, a rarely used resource competes for attention, and three solutions to the same need leave people deciding which one to use.
• The response is four explicit decisions—Protect, Improve, Combine, and Retire—with a question attached to each.
• The post suggests that annual planning replace “what should we add next year?” with “what has the organization earned the right to stop doing?”
• The answer is not age or novelty, but changed need, a better alternative, low use, or an effort-to-value mismatch.

For brands planning a campaign

This post offers a ready-made keynote structure and advisory frame. A brand or consultancy can use the four decisions in a workshop or audit checklist, and the closing question can open a session.

It is the most personal post and the one that explains their argument about judgment.

A colleague used a short prompt, asking AI to act like a learning designer and give feedback on a learning product.

• Sharron Crawford Corle describes a complicated reaction, including the uncomfortable question of what remains for an actual learning designer.
• The AI feedback was thoughtful, structured, and useful—which made it interesting.
• What it lacked was the judgment built over more than twenty years of designing learning experiences.
• The post illustrates that judgment with specific examples: noticing when something is technically sound but cognitively overwhelming, recognizing when accurate content will not move a learner, sensing when a well-designed activity asks too much of the audience in front of you, and knowing when to follow the model or break it.
• The piece distinguishes the artifacts of expertise—language, structure, and frameworks—from expertise itself, then asks which part of a person's expertise is hardest to prompt.

For brands planning a campaign

An AI-era expertise session can draw on this post because it takes a defensible position rather than offering a slogan. It also supplies a concrete prompt-versus-judgment demonstration a facilitator can run live.

The central argument is that AI may help leadership development by forcing organizations to define leadership more clearly.

• Writing a compelling memo, building a polished presentation, synthesizing information quickly, and making fast, confident decisions are valuable skills, but they may or may not indicate leadership—and AI is making many of them easy to produce.
• What remains, the post argues, is a set of behaviors: helping a team navigate uncertainty, knowing when to push and when to listen, noticing the person who has not spoken yet, making values-based decisions when the data points several ways, and developing other people.
• Sharron Crawford Corle objects to the term soft skills: helping people through change, trust, conflict, and growth is not soft.
• The post closes by suggesting the AI era rewards leaders who discern the most, not those who produce the most.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for a leadership-development brief seeking an AI angle beyond tool training. The list of behaviors can become an assessment or workshop discussion prompt.

It explains why the recommendations favor conditions and reinforcement over more courses.

The post opens with a blunt admission: no one can make another person learn.

• Yet L&D often designs as if the opposite were true.
• Learning is something a learner does, not something handed over.
• A designer can introduce an idea, ask a question that prompts reconsideration, create practice, build in reflection, bring people into conversation with others who see things differently, and make it easier to try something new back at work.
• The post's central metaphor is architect versus gardener: prepare the soil, plant, create conditions, and give room, attention, and time—but do not do the growing.
• It ends on a small distinction with large consequences: designing for learning rather than designing learning.

For brands planning a campaign

This gives facilitators a memorable way to explain why a one-off course cannot carry a change program—a common objection an advisory engagement must overcome.

The post argues that the hardest part of learning work is not designing good learning but explaining why it cannot be a single event.

• Behavior change requires practice in real conditions, feedback over time, modeled and reinforced behavior, and room to try, miss, adjust, and try again.
• A webinar can start awareness, name a problem, provide useful information, and even spark motivation, but it cannot rewire habits.
• Much of the work, the post says, is translation: helping people see that learning is designed, reinforced, and revisited rather than deployed.
• It ends by asking which behavior the reader is trying to change without changing anything around it.

For brands planning a campaign

Give this to a sponsor before an engagement begins: it sets the expectation that a single session is a start, not a fix. It also offers a memorable closing question for a workshop with non-L&D stakeholders.

It pairs the subtraction argument with a point about the quality of thinking.

Sharron Crawford Corle argues that learning conversations focus on speed—getting people up to speed, rolling things out faster and shortening time to learn—while giving far less attention to better thinking.

• The familiar response is more content, shorter sessions, quicker rollouts and less room to pause.
• They frame learning as sense-making, which takes time to reflect, permission to notice what is not working and courage to name repeated patterns.
• The question is not whether to add more content, but whether it helps people make better thinking a habit.
• The piece closes by asking L&D and talent development readers what kind of thinking their learning helps people practice over time.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful when a buyer wants faster onboarding or a quicker rollout: the post offers a considered counter-position and a question that reframes the need.

In a thread titled "What If We Built It Differently?", they shift the question from "what should we create next?" to what belongs in the portfolio: what to create, curate, maintain, stop, experiment with, and simply get out of the way of. The audience is people who set L&D strategy, not those looking for instructional techniques.

For brands planning a campaign

Directly usable for a brief on rethinking an L&D operating model. A keynote or advisory session can center on the portfolio question, and the framing gives audiences a way to audit what their teams already run.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

They propose four decisions to make before annual planning asks what to add next: Protect what is working, Improve what matters but underperforms, Combine duplicate solutions, and Retire what has outlived its need. The issue is framed as a strategy problem, not a content-management problem.

Protect / Improve / Combine / Retire, applied during annual planning before deciding what to add.

Crawford Corle acknowledges that sometimes more people, budget, or technology is exactly what is needed. They present subtraction as an additional discipline alongside creation, not a replacement for it.

For brands planning a campaign

A ready-made workshop or keynote structure, complete with a named exercise audiences can apply to their own portfolios. The built-in caveat also makes the argument defensible with skeptical internal audiences.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The output was thoughtful, structured, and useful — which made it unsettling.

• What it lacked was judgment: noticing when something is technically sound but cognitively overwhelming, when accurate content will not move a learner, when an activity asks too much of the room, and when to break the model.
• Crawford Corle locates that judgment in 20-plus years of pattern recognition and context, then asks readers which part of their own expertise is hardest to put into a prompt.

For brands planning a campaign

A strong fit for L&D and HR audiences working through AI adoption and role anxiety. The talk focuses on what to protect, not what to fear, and its closing question gives the session a natural discussion prompt.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Leadership is defined instead by what happens when the playbook runs out: helping a team navigate uncertainty, knowing when to push and when to listen, noticing the person who has not spoken, making values-based calls when the data points several ways, and developing other people. The essay also pushes back on the term "soft skills," and suggests the AI era may reward leaders who discern the most rather than produce the most.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for executive or leadership-development programming, or for a sponsor seeking a session on what to keep investing in as AI takes over production work. The essay gives audiences a defensible list of leader behaviors to develop.

Examples: Source 1

They reframe L&D’s role from architect — constructing knowledge one course at a time — to gardener: preparing soil, planting, creating conditions, and giving room and time, without doing the growing.

• L&D designs the conditions in which curiosity, conversation, reflection, practice, feedback, and application can work.
• A companion piece adds that knowledge becomes perspective only through reflection.

Treat the learner as the one who does the learning. Design conditions, practice, reflection, and application instead of assuming delivery transfers learning.

For brands planning a campaign

A strong anchor for a learning-design audience or a session redefining what an L&D function is for. The metaphor also gives a sponsor a memorable foundation for a workshop.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Crawford Corle argues that behavior change comes from practicing in real conditions, getting feedback over time, seeing the behavior modeled and reinforced, and having room to try, miss, adjust, and try again.

• A webinar can build awareness or spark motivation, but it cannot rewire habits.
• They describe much of the day-to-day work as translating for the rest of the business.

The piece credits single events with real value — naming a problem, providing information, sparking motivation — while arguing that they do not change habits on their own.

For brands planning a campaign

Well suited to change-management, internal-comms, or non-L&D stakeholder audiences that control requests for one-off training. The speaker can make the case for reinforcement without dismissing the original ask.

Examples: Source 1

Crawford Corle describes leaders who can recite every model but struggle to lead through uncertainty, and argues that reflection is where knowledge turns into perspective.

• They describe "there is no learning without reflection" as a closing reminder used in sessions.
• The second essay questions L&D’s focus on speed — shorter sessions, quicker rollouts — and argues that learning shows up when people see and choose differently when it counts.
• It ends by asking readers what kind of thinking their learning helps people practice over time.

For brands planning a campaign

Fits audiences being pushed toward volume and speed metrics, or a sponsor seeking a reflective, slower-paced keynote rather than a tactics session. The closing question works as a facilitated discussion prompt.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The usual structure is a question or a moment of discomfort, a close observation from practice, a reframe or a small framework, and a closing question put to the reader.

• Recurring series labels — "What If We Built It Differently" and "Thinking Out Loud" — mark sustained threads rather than one-off posts, and one essay announces an explicit pivot from writing about AI and learning agility into a months-long question series.
• The prose is plain and largely free of jargon; examples come from unnamed colleagues, learners, and leaders rather than named clients, and the posts carry no vendor or product content.

Consistent devices: a series hashtag, a named reframe, and a reader question at the end of nearly every post.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand can expect a contributor with a finished point of view and a question for the audience, making them a fit for co-authored articles, discussion-leading sessions, or a series-style partnership. Product-led or demo-style content would need deliberate shaping; their posts don't work that way.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

Both treat subtraction as a leadership discipline with named tests, not a cleanup exercise.

Gilmurray addresses whole organisations and executives in long, researched articles with named case studies and cited sources, and points readers to a book and a subscription. Crawford Corle stays within the L&D function, writing short, reflective first-person essays that draw on unnamed colleagues, learners and leaders rather than published examples.

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One first-person account describes being stuck with low platform engagement and rebuilding the operating model around workforce signals, role-based coaching and behavior change instead of completion rates. Both write about designing for different learners in the same room.

Shahid writes structured, numbered how-to posts for trainers and instructional designers, with frameworks, checklists and a comment prompt at the end. Crawford Corle writes essayistic pieces that challenge a premise and end with a question, with few step-by-step instructions.

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Both argue that practitioners are paid for their judgment, not the artifact.

Stephens writes from inside a consultancy, so the posts include event recaps, a company launch, programme descriptions and client results. Crawford Corle's posts contain no commercial content and stay focused on the argument.

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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.

The public framework is thinner and the register more instructional.

• The persona post is a numbered benefits list rather than a developed argument, and the turnaround post rests on one practitioner's single case.
• The figures are not substantiated and no organisation is named, so ask for the underlying evidence and the organisation behind the case.
• Neither post offers a named, transferable planning device the client can put in front of a leadership team, or engages with the AI-era expertise question relevant to a campaign on that topic.
• If the client wants senior leaders to leave with a reframe and a reusable planning prompt rather than a training-room method, these posts support the method better than the reframe.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

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.

There is little here on operating models or on deciding what an L&D function should stop doing, the centre of a campaign on L&D operating models.

• The two posts also differ in kind: the AI panel post is reflective and specific, while the venture post is an announcement with a website call to action, showing a business and a market position rather than a body of thinking.
• The profitability figure comes with no method, client name or period, so ask for those details before using it in an internal sell.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

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.

The material is not about learning and development.

• Neither article addresses the L&D operating model, instructional design, behaviour change or AI-era expertise, so the buyer's audience of L&D leaders would need the argument translated from general operating design into the learning function.
• Ask for an example of how the argument applies specifically to L&D before booking on this topic.

Examples: Source 1