When Learning is the First to Go

More than half my team gave me an answer I wasn't expecting.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been asking each person on my team a version of the same question.

How are you doing with your workload? Are you still protecting time to learn and practice with AI? Have you tried using it to solve a problem differently than you did last week?

I ask because I don't want AI learning to become something we talk about but never actually have time to do.

And more than half my team told me some version of:

Honestly, no.

Things had gotten so busy with other things they were doing that learning had moved to the back burner.

My first reaction wasn't that they needed to prioritize it better.

It was that I needed to look at what was making it so hard to prioritize.

Because these are smart, motivated people. If more than half of them couldn't find room for something we all agreed was important, telling them to “make the time” wasn't going to solve much.

I needed to look at what I could help them stop doing, delay or deprioritize so they actually had room to invest in themselves.

Across most industries and roles, development has traditionally been something we fit around our “real work.”

The focus is to finish the deliverable and attend the meetings. Answer the emails and meet the deadlines.

Then, if there's time left, we learn.

The problem is that there is rarely time left.

And in this moment, when AI is changing how knowledge work gets done so quickly, learning how to work differently can't continually be the thing we push to next week.

Learning is part of the work now.

But that doesn't mean adding “learn AI” to an already impossible list.

If learning keeps getting pushed aside, I'd look at three things before assuming someone simply needs to prioritize it better:

Capacity: Is there actually room in their workload to learn, or have we given them 45 hours of priorities and told them to squeeze development into hour 46?

Permission: Do our actions tell people it's genuinely okay to spend work time experimenting, or does learning suddenly become optional the minute a deadline gets tight?

Application: Are we asking people to “learn AI,” or helping them find real work where they can practice using it differently?

That last one matters almost more than the rest.

Someone doesn't necessarily need another hour-long course or to attend another AI bootcamp. They may need an hour to take a problem they're already working on and experiment with a completely different way of solving it using AI.

That's where learning starts becoming part of the work instead of competing with it.

And leaders have more influence over these conditions than we sometimes realize.

If I tell someone that developing new skills is important, but everything about the environment I've helped create tells them delivering today's work matters more, I've already told them which one to choose.

This matters to me for reasons that go well beyond AI.

When I became a manager for the first time, part of the reason I wanted to lead people was because I'd had an experience with a manager that I never wanted someone else to have.

I knew what it felt like when the person responsible for leading you forgot about the human being doing the work.

I've carried that with me throughout my career.

Yes, I have a responsibility to deliver results.

But I also believe I have a responsibility to be a good steward of what lands on my team.

That includes their workload and wellbeing, but it also includes their growth.

I want the people who work with me to leave stronger than when they arrived. More capable. More confident in what they bring. Better prepared for whatever comes next.

Especially now.

If you're leading people, take ten minutes this week and look at capacity, permission and application.

If someone's learning has disappeared, which one is getting in the way?

Then instead of asking, “Have you made time to learn?” try asking:

“What can I help move so you have room to learn, and what's one real piece of work you could use to practice differently this week?”

If you're not leading a team, ask yourself the same questions. What is actually preventing your own learning right now: capacity, permission or not knowing where to apply it?

ONE THING I'M LOVING 🩵

This week, I'm loving watching what happens when people get enough space to actually experiment with AI instead of simply reading about it.

The most interesting learning rarely comes from another course or presentation. It comes from taking a real problem you're already wrestling with and asking, Could I approach this differently?

Sometimes it works beautifully. Sometimes it doesn't. Both teach you something and more than anything I love learning from others, seeing what they've figured out what to do and how it lights them up. 

We all knonw that the pace of work isn't going to slow down simply because people need time to catch up.

That's what makes this moment so important.

We can't spend every available hour delivering what matters today and expect ourselves or our people to somehow prepare for tomorrow in whatever scraps of time are left.

The faster work changes, the more deliberate we have to become about protecting room to change with it.

So if learning keeps disappearing from your calendar, don't immediately make it a problem about your own discipline.

Look at what's surrounding it.

Do you have the capacity, permission and opportunity to actually practice?

And if you lead people, what are you doing to make sure they do?

Remember, you are still the author of what comes next.

Warmly,

Heather

Anchored in Possibility™ | The future belongs to those who know who they are when everything changes.