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 era
It develops when leaders deliberately rework structure, culture and habits so that weak signals get noticed early, stale assumptions get surfaced, dissent becomes a source of foresight instead of friction, and turbulence becomes fuel for learning rather than something to survive. In practice, prosilience takes shape through three core commitments.
It is intentional. It shows up in how you structure teams, hire and promote, use data and tell the story of your organization. Leaders who practice it treat the organization itself as a design project.
It is systemic. It is not a trait of few heroic individuals. It lives in how information flows, how people communicate across levels, how much room there is to experiment and how widely learning gets shared.
It is ethical. It asks not only whether an organization can adapt, but what it transforms into.It asks who the system is serving while it adapts and whose dignity gets treated as negotiable along the way.
In our workplace research across health care, education and L&D, we constantly meet leaders who were practicing prosilience before anyone had a word for it. They conceive of their job as design work: of structures, of learning systems, of human capability, of a purpose that means something to the people doing the work.
4 choices that build prosilience
Prosilience stays abstract until you can point to it in daily decisions. For learning leaders, four choices determine whether the function is still teaching precedent or starting to build prosilience.
Rebuild the structure beyond the behavior. Too many leadership programs teach collaboration, then send people back to their silos and chains of command. If you keep building the same structures, you will keep getting the same behavior. Treat your program architecture the way prosilient leaders treat the org chart: as a working hypothesis, not a fixed artifact. Learning leaders can design cohorts, action-learning projects and rotations that connect functions, levels, geographies and identities before a crisis forces the connection.
Widen what counts as learning data. Precedent-driven leaders ask for the dashboard. Prosilient ones ask for the dashboard and the stories behind the numbers. Few functions are better equipped to hear those stories than L&D.
Alongside completions and overall scores, gather rapid-cycle data on how people actually experience the work, what they fear, what they are quietly learning that no survey would think to ask. Then, bring both into the same conversation on purpose. When engagement looks fine but the stories point to quiet fear, trust the gap enough to discover why.
Treat human capability as infrastructure. Without it, even the best strategy buckles under pressure. Emotional intelligence is not a nice-to-have; it is how you manage risk before it compounds. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows why: It enables the learning behaviors—asking questions, admitting errors, raising concerns—that let problems surface while they are still small. Make these capacities explicit in job profiles, hiring criteria, coaching agendas and promotion decisions.
Redefine what success means. Precedent-driven leaders measure success by whether they kept the lights on. Prosilient leaders ask a harder question: What did this disruption do to our people, our relationships and our integrity? They put well-being, belonging and growth on the same dashboard as financial results and ask who bears the brunt of change.
For learning leaders, that means assessing development by whether people come through disruption more capable and connected, or more depleted. Human flourishing is not a byproduct of good strategy. It is a precondition for the sustained adaptation strategy depends on.
The common thread is not crisis response. It is capability built before the crisis arrives.
Cleveland Clinic offers a vivid illustration. In January 2018, as he took over as CEO, Dr. Tom Mihaljevic piloted a tiered daily huddle at the main campus: a 15-minute, same-time, same-people meeting that moves information up through six tiers, from frontline caregivers to the executive team, which meets every morning at 11 a.m. Each huddle covers quality, safety, patient experience, environmental care and infrastructure, and escalated issues are typically resolved within a day. By the time COVID-19 reached Ohio, the structure had been running for two years.
The pandemic did not force Cleveland Clinic to invent a way of seeing itself under pressure. It already had one. The same huddles began carrying new content: patients under investigation at each hospital, COVID-positive patients on regular floors and in ICUs, caregivers out sick or testing positive. The system did not have to create an emergency channel in the middle of an emergency.
Pfizer’s Global Clinical Supply group tells a similar story, documented in a Harvard Business School case series by Linda Hill and Lydia Begag. When Michael Ku took the helm in 2011, he set out to build an end-to-end clinical supply chain and focused first on fostering a culture of innovation. As industry coverage of the group describes, cross-functional teams trained and cross-trained together to build trust in one another’s capabilities. When COVID-19 arrived, that groundwork helped the group deliver Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine in just 266 days.
Neither organization was betting on a pandemic. Both were building simpler habits: developing people across boundaries, and moving information quickly in both directions, every day, whether anything unusual was happening or not. Both, at heart, are learning systems. That is what prosilience looks like in practice. Most of the real work happens long before anyone calls it crisis leadership.
The Pfizer case also carries a cautionary tale: After years of continuous transformation, engagement scores signaled rising fatigue by 2025. Prosilience is not immunity. It is a practice that must keep tending the people who carry it.
How to start, without adding another initiative
Another initiative may be the last thing your organization can absorb. Start instead by changing the questions you ask in the teams you already lead.
In your next program design review, ask where the organization is relying on precedent because it feels safer. Asked consistently and with real courage, that question shifts the belief system leaders carry into every room, moving an organization from one that braces for disruption to one that is built to meet it.
Start by taking one recent disruption and use it as curriculum, treating it as material for redesign rather than an ordeal everyone survived. Audit one flagship program: Who is in the room together, and who never is? Add one qualitative signal to your learning dashboard and discuss it beside the numbers.
Leaders who take this stance will not be exempt from turbulence. No one is.
But they, and the organizations they help build, will meet whatever comes next with the capacity to shape it rather than simply survive it. The era of precedent is over. Prosilience is what comes next, and the L&D function plays a central role in its construction.
