Why Learning Enablement Teams are a no brainer for modern organisations

Having seen Tsvetelina Plummer and Berrin Akvardar’s insightful talk at the Fast Flow Conference about GfK — an NIQ Company’s Learning Enablement Team, I felt compelled to explore the idea more with them. In fact, it aligns closely with a key theme I’ve been exploring in my own work: that balance between autonomy and alignment in teams.

Two elements have emerged as being critical to achieving this balance:

• Organisational learning — empowering people to effectively share knowledge, and harness the tremendous power of collective learning
• Enablement teams — helping product development teams gain new capabilities by providing supporting technology and sharing knowledge; removing friction whilst preserving the freedom to innovate

Here Tsvetelina and Berrin were, joining both of those things together into one thing, with Learning Enablement Teams.

So I caught up with Tsvetelina to learn more about the origins of the team, its mission and the tangible impact it’s having on her organisation.

🙋 A mission-led team

This Learning Enablement Team (LET) operates virtually and cross-functionally with members united by a shared mission rather than reporting lines. Formed organically in response to an emergent need for better cross-silo knowledge-sharing, the team has a clear mandate with dedicated budget to drive its initiatives.

• Agile coaches: craft a space for sharing of learning needs across the organisation, facilitate the events and coach contributors in the art of training
• Engineering leaders: advocate for knowledge sharing among technical teams
• Community managers: facilitate connections and communication
• Subject matter experts: bring their knowledge and experience as content in these events

As Tsvetelina put it: “We are united by purpose, not by a reporting line.”

🎯 The mission: create a culture of knowledge-sharing

The formation of the LET was a direct response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It revealed two things:

• The difficulty people had in sharing knowledge in an online environment
• An underlying need for learning enablement — because, let’s face it, not everyone is naturally skilled at training or knowledge transfer

On a deeply human level, supporting and enabling people to share their ideas, by tackling the fears that hold them back: “I’ve never done this before and I’m scared”, “Am I good enough”, “Do I have anything interesting to show/say?”, they hope to boost confidence levels which, in turn, will nurture an open and courageous environment for all.

“People want to share beyond their community of practice because actually they are also a silo. So we have a mixture of content from tech, agile, product, design, and business to really cross-pollinate ideas”

👋Key activities: taking the pain out of knowledge-sharing

The LET runs regular knowledge-sharing events, typically four times a year, and they’ve honed their approach to make these sessions both impactful and sustainable:

• Designing and facilitating engaging events: These are hands-on, interactive events, and the LET provides training, coaching and mentoring to enable contributors to overcome fears and share their knowledge in engaging ways.
• Nurturing participation: The LET takes a grassroots approach to participation. They ask senior leadership to recognise rather than incentivise, preserving the intrinsic value of contributing. In parallel they ensure that contributors have the guidance and support to make them feel safe. This is not about perfection, it is about everyone contributing where they can.
• Curating high quality content: Community voting ensures the relevancy of content is maintained. Constant feedback is gathered by the LET and used to continuously improve the events and the content.
• The next big goal: is to curate all the fantastic content generated into a navigable knowledge base — ensuring it has maximum impact. They have over 100 artefacts now, with topics as wide-ranging as “Consumer-driven contract testing”, “How to Prompt Engineering with LLMs like PaLM2 and ChatGPT” and “User testing in action — Discovery, Iterative tesing, UATs”.

“We want this to be something people do because they see the value in it, not because they have to”

💰 Articulating the benefits: why it matters

The mission to create a culture of knowledge-sharing is firmly rooted in its capacity to improve business outcomes. Something the LET are able to articulate clearly:

• Reduction in redundant training: By pooling and sharing knowledge, and by engineering leads collaborating on running training sessions, they have cut down on duplicated training efforts
• Accelerated problem-solving and innovation: People now have faster access to the knowledge they need, which leads to quicker problem-solving and more innovation.
• Enhanced collaboration: Regular events and shared experiences help build valuable networks, enabling smoother future collaborations across teams. Through these experiences they have seen an increase in empathy across different parts of the organisation.

“We actively look for stories where people say, ‘This knowledge I gained helped me solve a problem more quickly, without having to start from scratch.’”

💡 Why this matters

This conversation got me thinking about how often shared learning initiatives — internal conferences, hack days, blogging — are treated as “nice to haves” rather than strategic priorities. By giving resources and a mandate to a team who are passionate about addressing this need, organisations can develop a learning culture and create long term value from it.

This concept of a Learning Enablement Team would have been very useful at my previous organisation and I wish I’d thought of it! It encapsulates beautfully the connection between engineering enablement and the growth and development of the whole department. Enablement is about more than a few specific technologies; it’s about equipping teams with the skills, confidence, connections and courage they need to drive innovation.

Thank you Tsvetelina for the inspiration and the insight 💡