Culture by Design: Shaping a Learning Ecosystem That Works for Everyone
Presented at LEARNTEC 2026 | Karlsruhe, Germany | May 5–7, 2026
We’re heading to LEARNTEC 2026, Europe’s leading event for digital education, to present Culture by Design: Shaping a Learning Ecosystem That Works for Everyone. LEARNTEC brings together the e-learning community at Messe Karlsruhe for three days of ideas, tools, technology, and practical conversations about the future of learning at work, in higher education, and in schools.
Our session tackles a problem most organizations recognize but rarely name clearly: more training does not automatically create better performance.
Too often, L&D teams are asked to fix workflow, culture, communication, and performance problems with another course. But strong learning cultures are not built by adding more content to the catalog. They are built by designing the conditions that help people learn in the flow of real work.
In this practical, hands-on session, we’ll help participants look beyond the content factory and examine the systems underneath learning: access, friction, rewards, psychological safety, peer knowledge, experimentation, and the everyday signals that tell people whether learning is truly valued.
Participants will walk away with a simple diagnostic playbook they can use to assess their own learning culture and identify small, practical experiments they can try right away. We’ll explore tactics like peer-sourced know-how, Working Out Loud, and other ways L&D can shift from owning every answer to helping useful knowledge move through the organization.
The goal is simple: help L&D professionals stop treating learning culture like a slogan and start designing it like a system.
Slides & Related Resources
- View the session recap page
- Check out the references
- Try out the “Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro” GPT
If this kind of thinking hits home, you’ll probably enjoy our book Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D. It’s packed with practical, real-world ideas to help you make your learning clearer, sharper, and a whole lot more effective.