Moving the Green L&D agenda forward

I have been heartened recently by reading LinkedIn posts talking about the increasing strength of Learning & Development in organisations, and of the recognition of the important role that L&D can play in promoting a green agenda.

However, at times like this my 40 years in the business weighs heavily with the memory of so many false dawns in my mind. So reflecting on the George Santayana aphorism that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, I thought that I would look briefly at the history of L&D to see what we need to do in order to break any possible cycles that may thwart this progress.

L&D as a discrete organisational activity only appeared in the 1950s, as a continuation of the Second World War mobilisation and the post-war economic boom. By the 1980s the concept of ‘Human Resources’ was well established in Western economies, and developed particularly strong roots in those countries which embraced neoliberal models of economic development. A neoliberal perspective sees everything as a financial marketplace, and human resources are no different: the concept of human capital emerged, and employees started to become seen as assets to be exploited. “People are our greatest asset” was a mantra in the 1990s but served to obscure the dehumanisation of the workforce. This was perhaps my first false dawn as I entered L&D consultancy as an enthusiastic 30-something.

The rise of Strategic Human Resource Management strengthened the central importance of the organisation and its needs in all L&D activities, and learning design and development became oriented towards making sure that everyone could carry out exactly what the organisation needed. However, with organisations desperate to succeed in an ever-more competitive marketplace where scant regard was paid to environmental and social sustainability, the needs and interests of employees and the wider society was ignored. L&D became focused on making sure that employees had the technical knowledge to do what the organisation needed them to do, and largely failed to take into consideration the hopes, fears and values of employees in the processes of learning design, development and delivery.

However, now in the 2020s the power of the me-obsessed baby boomers and the political economy they embraced is waning, and we are increasingly aware of the environmental damage and social instability that the late 20^th century has wrought on all of us. Thankfully, many Millennials and those from succeeding generations are better educated and less self-obsessed than my generation has been, and they are throwing down the gauntlet for a more environmentally- and socially-aware L&D.

But the corporatist mindset and associated vested interests will resist change which threatens existing power structures. So my message is that green L&D needs to go beyond following a carefully-designed organisationally-limited sustainability agenda, using learning design tools crafted in a previous era to deliver just the corporate agenda, and to instead develop formal and informal learning programmes that will emancipate employees, will help them craft their organisation’s sustainability agenda and will help them contribute to organisational learning in a way that is personally meaningful and rewarding.

So I hope that by presenting this past as I remember it, readers will feel inspired to move forward in a way that challenges old orthodoxies and really does help to create a new future for L&D and our world.