In most organisations, learning still happens in bursts. A quick online course. A half-day workshop here. A full-day session there. Calendars are rearranged, work pauses, and people spend hours absorbing slide after slide before returning to overflowing inboxes and deadlines that have only grown in their absence. Whatever learning happened is quickly buried beneath the work waiting for them.
It’s not because organisations don’t value learning. It’s because we’ve inherited a model that assumes learning has to happen away from work.
That model is expensive, disruptive and, too often, overloaded.
It’s also why many smaller organisations simply don’t invest. When budgets are tight, taking an entire team off the floor for a day can feel like a luxury they can’t justify.
Yet some of the world’s most respected organisations, think Google, Pixar, Toyota, Patagonia, and Microsoft, approach learning very differently.
Rather than relying on occasional training events, they build leader-led learning into everyday work. Managers don’t just supervise performance; they facilitate conversations, guide reflection, and create opportunities for their teams to learn together. Learning becomes part of the culture rather than something scheduled between meetings.
The problem is that building this kind of culture usually requires significant investment. Large organisations have learning teams, instructional designers, facilitators and sizeable budgets creating resources for leaders to use. Many businesses are often left trying to replicate the outcome without the people or the budget to make it happen.
That’s the gap I want to close.
Real learning doesn’t need a seminar room or a glossy workbook. It needs rhythm: small, structured moments woven into the flow of work. TA focused 30-minute activity every week or fortnight. A system that leads to practical conversations that helps a team solve a real problem together this week, not “someday.”
When learning happens this way, it becomes part of how work gets done rather than a break from it. Capability grows without the cost and disruption of traditional training, and it aligns with decades of learning science showing that people retain more when they learn in small doses, revisit ideas, apply them immediately and build on existing knowledge.
I learned this long before I worked in learning and development.
When I was managing Production Assistants on film sets, we were constantly bringing together crews from different productions, companies and backgrounds. Independent contractors, union members, studio staff, local hires, talent and executives all had to become one team almost overnight. We had to deliver quickly. If I’d had access to a simple, practical 30-minute activity that helped us establish communication standards and working agreements in the first week, we could have found our rhythm much sooner. Instead, we learned through friction and fatigue.
The same thing happened when I helped open Community Natural Foods’ Chinook Market. We were a brand-new leadership team in a brand-new store serving a brand-new community. There was no playbook. We worked hard, trusted each other and became profitable within six weeks. But we achieved that through instinct and grit rather than structure. Looking back, a handful of thoughtfully designed leader-led learning activities could have accelerated our collaboration and strengthened the culture we were trying to build.
Those experiences shaped how I think about learning.
I’m building Yzly on the belief that the benefits of leader-led learning shouldn’t be reserved for organisations with enterprise budgets. Every leader should have access to practical, evidence-based activities that help their teams connect, think, solve problems and grow together.
My goal isn’t to replace L&D Team, Consultants and focused development programs. It’s to help organisations build a living library of learning that leaders can draw on every week, gradually embedding learning into the culture instead of treating it as an event.
No inflated budgets. No theatre. Just practical tools that help leaders lead and teams learn.
Because when learning becomes part of the work itself, small, steady and shared, it stops being a privilege enjoyed by a few well-funded organisations.
It becomes the way people work together.