A Mid-Action Review: Reflection and Learning Strategy in the LLM Era

I’ll say this much for the superheated AI FOMO environment of the last couple of years: It’s offered a singular opportunity for leaders (and organizations) to reflect on their own capacity for continuous learning and transformation.

Zoom out from your personal lived experience of the ChatGPT era for a moment to consider the whole premise in abstract as it was presented to leaders across a huge range of industries as 2022 rolled into 2023 and then 2024.

1. The what and the how of work (yours, mine, everyone’s?) are going to be deeply disrupted – and soon.

2. That disruption will be enabled by a set of tools that is growing in capability by the month if not the day.

3. In fact, capabilities that would’ve seemed wildly out of reach a year ago are already being taken for granted. Goal posts are moving, brother.

4. Remarkably, the tools that will enable the disruption of your work and perhaps your org and even industry are also AVAILABLE TO YOU. Today. At a very low cost.

5. One caveat: The evolving capabilities of those tools aren’t… entirely reliable. Using them effectively and ethically is going to require a hands-on approach with a lot of experimentation, discipline, and learning. Ok, go!

Reasonable people can quibble a bit over the details (Was the superintelligence supposed to arrive at the beginning or end of 2025??? etc), but I think the general framing I’ve recapped here is broadly correct. This, more or less, is what everyone was hearing – and believing.

From 2023 through 2025, I estimate that I attended ~20 executive education / corporate L&D events each year, and the vast majority of them incorporated some version of the now-cliche maxim: Leaders won’t be replaced by AI; they’ll be replaced by leaders who use AI. If I were to dig around long enough, I’m pretty sure I could come up with a photo of a roomful of executives whipping out their phones to snap photos of a slide saying exactly that during an event keynote session circa 2023.

All of this is to say that we’ve just lived through a pretty incredible moment wherein a massive population of leaders has been presented with an urgent dual narrative of looming crisis and opportunity. They heard it, and they believed it. They saw the demos; they had the tools. On top of that, they also had access to endless resources and virtual communities of learning and practice via LinkedIn, YouTube, Substack, whatever. And presumably, they had plenty of motivation.

So… what did they do?

Did they take a wait-and-see approach? Did they go all-in on a few big bets? Did they develop a systematic approach to ongoing experimentation? How did they support knowledge sharing? Did they take a top-down or bottom-up approach? Did they depend on received wisdom and/or outside consultants? Did they develop and communicate a consistent org-level strategy? Did they stay engaged as the landscape continued to shift? Did they burn out?

This, of course, is where the opportunity for reflection comes in: What did YOU do? What did your teams and your org do?

And what do those choices and actions (taken or not taken) say about the approach to learning and navigation in an environment that’s been characterized by continuous change, high volatility, and deep uncertainty. An environment, one might argue, that could be seen as a pretty useful microcosm for exploring the possible futures of business.

And now, if you could take your org, team, or self back to the earliest days of the ChatGPT/LLM era, how would you build your learning strategy differently the second time around?

We can’t go back to Nov 2022, but we can be virtually certain that the future will continue to reward effective and rapid learning. In fact, so long as the superintelligence can keeps getting kicked down the proverbial road (maybe for the best at this point!), we can also be sure that the LLM era itself will continue to reward agile learning as well. Pausing today, three years into a journey of unspecified duration – and with an unknown destination, for a bit of an after-action review (even with much of the action still to come) gives us a chance to refine our approach, reconsider some of our systems, and better prepare ourselves to thrive as leaders and learners in the turbulence we know lies ahead.

@Jeffrey