Insights
You bought a platform. You still don't have a learning ecosystem.
I've deployed Learning Experience Platforms at enterprise scale. More than once. I've been the person standing in front of a VP six months after launch trying to explain why the adoption numbers aren't where the vendor demo said they'd be. So I have feelings about this topic.
The pitch is always the same, and it's always compelling. Personalized learning paths. AI-curated content. LinkedIn Learning, your internal library, third-party content — all in one place, surfaced intelligently. Netflix for professional development. Self-directed learning at scale. Every VP loves it because it sounds like it solves two problems at once: learners get flexibility, the organization gets efficiency.
And then you launch it.
Usage spikes for about two weeks. You get some nice screenshots for the steering committee. Then it settles into a pattern that I've now seen enough times to consider a law of nature: roughly 15% of the organization uses it regularly. That 15% was already self-directed. They were reading books, taking courses, asking for stretch assignments before the platform existed. You just gave them a shinier tool.
The other 85% logs in when they're reminded and completes what's assigned. Which is exactly what they were doing with the LMS you just spent $400K replacing.
The platform didn't fail. The assumption failed. The assumption that technology creates learning culture. It doesn't. An LXP without a learning strategy is a content library with a nicer UI. And honestly, most organizations already had a content library. It was called the shared drive.
I've seen exactly two LXP deployments that I'd call genuinely successful. Both had the same three things going for them.
First: someone was curating. Not the algorithm. A human. Someone with editorial judgment who looked at the 47,000 pieces of content on the platform and said "here are the twelve things that matter for this organization right now." More content is not better learning. More content is more noise. The platforms that drive real engagement have someone making choices, not just aggregating.
Second: managers talked about it. Not in performance reviews. In regular work conversations. "I watched this thing on the platform, here's what I took from it." That one behavior — a manager modeling that they use the tool — does more for adoption than any launch campaign, any gamification feature, any email reminder. I've measured this. The correlation between manager modeling and team adoption is embarrassingly strong.
Third: the platform showed up when people already had a question. A new process rollout — there's a module for that. A quality incident — here's the refresher. A role transition — here's your onboarding path. Learning that competes with the flow of work loses. Learning that shows up inside the flow of work wins. Every time.
An LXP is infrastructure. It's the road. It's not the destination. And I wish someone had told me that before I stood in front of that VP the first time.
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