Leading a learning function today creates a strange dissonance. The playbook has never been thicker with competency models, best-practice libraries, benchmarks, vendor case studies—an entire industry has grown up just to package what worked somewhere else.
At the same time, each new disruption bears less resemblance to what worked for anyone last quarter, or last decade. Cameras go dark in the virtual classroom. Questions come in private more often than in public. Completion rates hold while capability does not.
You feel that the organization is getting physically tired faster than it is getting better. In response, you launch another academy, another reskilling push, another culture reset. People nod along, but the spark has dimmed; maybe for you, too.
We call it precedent fatigue: the realization that the playbook you keep updating is not built for what you now face. For over a century, leadership ran on the logic of precedent. Leaders studied what worked, turned it into a template and asked their organizations to repeat it with more discipline and at greater scale. Corporate learning was built on that same logic.
Much of what learning and development does‚ from codifying best practice to certifying people against yesterday’s standards—is precedent made teachable. That logic held up in a world that was volatile but still broadly continuous. Today’s world is different in kind, not just in degree.
In 2018, futurist Jamais Cascio gave that logic difference a name: BANI, which replaced the older shorthand VUCA. It’s not simply that the world has gotten harder; it’s that our coping tools no longer work in a world where systems break rather than bend, where information overload breeds dread, small causes produce wildly disproportionate effects and explanations arrive too late, if at all.
The era of precedent is over. Reaching backward for what worked before is a liability. For learning leaders, that raises an uncomfortable question: If precedent fails us, what should we teach in this transition between the workplace we knew and the one we have yet to build. That is the central learning quandary of our time.
Yesterday’s logic is today’s risk
Precedent feels safe because it tells a comforting story: Someone, somewhere, has already solved this problem, so copy them, only faster, cheaper and with more discipline. Under stress, most leaders default to what worked before. That instinct locks the organization into yesterday’s assumptions exactly when those assumptions are failing.
Even our evidence about change runs on precedent; few statistics get repeated more often than the claim that 70 percent of change initiatives fail. Though management researcher Mark Hughes examined the published sources behind that figure in 2011 and concluded there was no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support it, the number survived anyway. And the fear it breeds produces exactly the defensive behavior (centralized control, risk aversion, retreat to the familiar) that causes real initiatives to stall.
The real data are more sobering than the myth, and more poignant for learning leaders: In a 2024 survey of more than 400 executives and senior leaders, Bain & Company found that 88 percent of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. The strongest predictor of success is how well a organization retains, develops and acquires talent. Struggling transformations lean on the same few star players until they burn out. Additionally, more than half of companies’ high performers were viewed as lacking the capabilities critical roles will require in five to 10 years. That is not a strategy problem. It is a learning problem.
Each failure adds to what organizational researchers John Bernerth, H. Jack Walker and Stanley Harris call change fatigue.
In unstable conditions, commitment, trust and discretionary effort are the resources an organization needs most, and what every learning experience ultimately depends on. But there is a secondary problem: Simply importing best practices ignores deep differences in context, power dynamics, history, identity, technology and regulation.
The result is a discernable pattern: launch, push, sag, rebrand, repeat. Underneath the language of agility and innovation, plenty of organizations get stuck in a precedent loop, trying to copy their way out of conditions no one like them has faced before.
The core problem is not effort. It is logic. When the environment breaks precedent, it can no longer serve as your compass.
For decades, organizations operated like machines: work converted to tasks, people into roles, performance into metrics. When that proved too brittle, a second metaphor took over: the organization as a living organism. Both still shape how most leaders, and most leadership curricula, think. Both are now incomplete.
Machines can be optimized, but only for conditions we already understand. Organisms can adapt, but only to environments they do not fundamentally alter. Human organizations do something neither can. It can construct the contexts we must adapt to through the policies we write, the technologies we adopt, the stories we tell about ourselves and the incentives and norms built into daily work. Leaders—and the learning leaders who develop them—are architects of the conditions that shape what becomes possible next.
Beyond bouncing back
In a BANI world, the baseline itself keeps moving. Resilience alone doesn’t cut it.
We call it “prosilience”—the deliberate practice of building adaptive capacity ahead of disruption, and the evolution beyond resilience. The question shifts from recovery to readiness: What capacities have we built into our structure, culture and daily work so that when disruption comes, people are not improvising courage, collaboration and judgment for the first time?
Instead of treating crises as exceptional moments that call for special behavior, prosilient organizations treat them as an extension of how they already operate. If resilience is how you land, prosilience is how you build the runway while you are still in the air.
Prosilience for a new
