A manifesto for learning that belongs to everyone
“Mr Hawkins, I’ve heard about you.”
It was my first day in Year 10 maths.
“You’re not going to pass my class. Sit down or leave.”
To be fair, I had acquired something of a reputation during junior high. There had been mischief, poor decisions and a few incidents I would not recommend as a learning strategy. A teacher might reasonably have approached me with caution, but caution leaves room for a person to surprise you. What I heard that day was a verdict.
Before I had attempted a problem, opened a textbook or been given the chance to do anything differently, someone in authority had decided who I was and what I was capable of becoming.
That was my first lesson in Year 10 maths, and it had nothing to do with mathematics.
I had always been uneasy around hierarchy. Growing up on the fringes of the punk and hardcore scenes, scepticism towards power, status and the accepted order of things became deeply ingrained in me. I struggled with people who expected reverence simply because of the position they occupied, and I was suspicious of systems that mistook authority for wisdom.
“Because I said so” never struck me as a particularly convincing argument.
The absence of empowerment in those early years did more than make me rebellious. It often left me feeling like an outsider, as though the places where other people seemed to belong had been built without a space for me.
I was diagnosed with depression at thirteen. It has remained with me ever since, not as a chapter that was eventually resolved, but as a lifelong companion. At times it has been a low shadow sitting at the edge of things. At others, everything around me has seemed to collapse into a black hole, and it has taken considerable effort simply to remain connected to the world.
For years, I thought I concealed this reasonably well. I did not want to burden people, attract sympathy or allow my struggle to become the reason I was treated differently. I never wanted a free or easy ride. I did not want to be excused from responsibility or seen only through the lens of what I was carrying. I wanted a fair chance to participate, contribute and find my own way.
A close friend told me recently that the people around me could see more than I realised. Even as a teenager, I would sometimes become quiet and withdraw into myself. They used to say that I had “gone dark.”
I thought I was protecting other people from what I carried. In reality, I was disappearing in front of them.
There is more darkness in my history than I intend to reveal here. Some experiences remain private because they belong to me, not because they lack importance. It is enough to say that depression, chronic migraines and cluster headaches have accompanied me through most of my life. My suffering has helped me build resilience and determination, and it has nearly broken me more than once; both are true.
I do not believe suffering automatically makes people stronger or wiser. Sometimes pain teaches. Sometimes it exhausts, isolates and diminishes. Sometimes surviving the day is the only achievement available.
I can only speak for what my own experience has taught me.
One of its deepest lessons is that we rarely know the whole of what another person is carrying. Someone can appear distracted, withdrawn, irritable or less productive while using nearly everything they have simply to remain present. A person can look capable while feeling as though they are coming apart, and they can appear disengaged when what they are really doing is retreating to protect themselves and the people around them.
Living with struggles that others could not fully see made me slower to assume and quicker to wonder. It taught me that people should not have to reveal their darkest experiences before a teacher, leader or organisation becomes willing to treat them with patience and dignity.
The same learner under different conditions
School gave me few reasons to believe that I belonged there. I hated it, distrusted many of the people who represented it and learned remarkably little inside its classrooms. A friend and I once held competitions to see who could fail most spectacularly and produce the most ridiculous marks.
It was not our most sophisticated act of resistance.
Outside school, however, I learned constantly. I devoured books, textbooks, National Geographic and encyclopaedias—the home internet of the 1970s and 80s, though considerably heavier and less searchable. I experimented, built things, created, dismantled and explored. Like many members of Generation X, I became independent, resourceful and accustomed to working things out with whatever happened to be available.
I was not incapable of learning. I was incapable of thriving in a system where obedience was mistaken for engagement and authority was used to close down possibility.
Eventually, I dropped out. I lived on the streets for a time, moved to an aunt’s house and hitchhiked around Western Canada and the United States. There is no romantic version of that period that would improve the truth. It was simply part of the path I took.
At around twenty or twenty-one, I returned to school.
This time, the relationship was different. The teachers I encountered acted less like unquestionable authorities and more like partners and guides. They still knew more than I did. They still set expectations and challenged my work. They did not make learning easy or remove responsibility from me.
What they did was treat me as someone capable of participating in my own development.
The results changed quickly. I returned to mathematics and began receiving marks in the nineties. Without any great campaign of study, I scored 92 per cent on my Year 12 biology exam.
I had not suddenly been issued a new brain. I had not transformed into a more deserving person. I was the same learner under different conditions.
The point of that story is not that my Year 10 teacher should have respected me because I was secretly clever enough to prove him wrong. No one should need future success to retroactively earn past dignity. Writing me off would still have been wrong had I later struggled to pass.
What changed was not my worth. It was the relationship around the learning. For the first time, I was given enough agency to discover what I could do.
Capability can be present long before a system is willing to recognise it. People can spend years believing they are deficient when what has failed them is the environment around them.
That conviction has followed me into every part of my work.
Learning still follows power
I eventually found my way into learning and development. Over the years, I have helped organisations analyse problems, understand behaviour, identify root causes and build the capabilities needed to produce different results.
I have also watched workplace learning reproduce many of the same hierarchies that frustrated me at school.
Too often, the people closest to organisational power receive the richest development. They are offered substantial programs, personal coaching, prestigious qualifications and protected time away from everyday work to think, reflect and grow.
Meanwhile, the people carrying much of the organisation’s daily work are handed a library of online content and told to take responsibility for their own development.
One group is treated as a strategic investment. The other is treated as self-service.
They are told to learn in the flow of work, but learning in the flow of work too often means learning in the leftovers of work. The urgent task wins. The customer issue wins. The meeting wins. The inbox wins. Development is pushed into whatever scraps of attention remain, and then the individual is held responsible when little changes.
The problem is not online learning. Nor is it personal responsibility. People should have agency over their growth, and access to good information can be valuable.
The problem is abandonment dressed up as empowerment.
A licence can provide content, but access to content is not the same as access to development. A catalogue cannot protect time, create a meaningful conversation between colleagues, notice a misunderstanding, encourage an uncertain attempt or help a team reflect on what happened when they put an idea into practice.
A licence is not a learning culture.
I do not begrudge senior leaders meaningful development. Their decisions affect many people, and they should be supported to make those decisions well. I am not declaring war on executive learning.
I am challenging the assumption that development should be concentrated where power already sits.
Potential does not increase with salary. Curiosity is not restricted to job titles, and the people closest to customers, operations and everyday delivery are not less deserving of serious investment because they sit further from the executive floor.
Learning should not become more plentiful as a person moves closer to power.
Why Yzly, and why now?
I am building Yzly now because I have finally developed the breadth of capability needed to do it properly.
Across decades of work, I have learned how to connect learning strategy, program architecture, research, behaviour, facilitation, visual communication, web technology and digital design. I can take a problem, work down towards its root causes and then build back up towards something practical. I can move from research to a capability model, from that model to a learning architecture, and from the architecture to a finished experience.
That breadth allows me to protect the thread running through the work.
I have seen thoughtful learning strategies lose their purpose as they pass through layers of committees, competing incentives and decisions made by people who have little understanding of what learning can achieve. This is not an argument against collaboration. Good work needs challenge, disagreement and input from the people affected by it.
But collaboration is not the same as design by veto.
Learning strategy can die by committee when position carries more weight than evidence, when political convenience becomes more important than behavioural change, or when investment decisions are shaped by the people most able to offer status, money and approval.
Expertise should not create superiority, but it should carry responsibility.
Yzly gives me the ability to move at a pace many businesses cannot accommodate internally while keeping the purpose intact. It allows me to bring together the skills I have developed over a lifetime and use them to solve problems at a scale that is not possible when all my time is traded to one person or one organisation at a time.
The aim is not to place one expert in front of thousands of people. A video can reach thousands without thousands of people learning very much.
The aim is to give thousands of teams the means to learn well together.
Yzly is for leaders who can see that their people need development but do not have an internal team able to support them at the pace required. It is for organisations that cannot afford to bring in an expensive consultant for every capability they need to build, and for teams that do not want another library of resources they are expected to navigate alone.
It is a way to provide high-quality, structured learning without requiring a professional learning designer or facilitator to be present in every room.
Leader-led does not mean leader-centred
Yzly is built around leader-led learning, and that language is deliberate.
Leaders often hold the budget, the calendar and the organisational permission. They can approve the investment, protect the allotted time and make learning legitimate rather than something people are expected to complete after the real work is done. When priorities compete, leaders can stop development from becoming the first thing removed from the schedule.
They can also role-model something important. By participating openly, asking questions and acknowledging what they are still learning, leaders can demonstrate that curiosity is not weakness and that nobody becomes too senior to grow.
Without that permission, learning can easily fall on deaf ears.
But leader-led is the point of entry, not the centre of gravity.
It does not mean putting the leader at the front of the room, handing them a facilitator guide and recreating the same hierarchy under a more modern heading. The program is not designed around the authority of the teacher, facilitator or manager. It is designed around the learning.
When leaders participate, they participate as equals in the learning process. They do not sit outside the experience and assess everyone else’s contribution. They share their thinking, attempt the activities, admit uncertainty and reflect on their own behaviour.
Facilitation can move around the team. Experience can come from anywhere. A useful insight does not become more correct because it came from the person with the most expensive job title.
Yzly is leader-led, team-owned and learning-centred. Leaders create the conditions. Teams make the learning real.
A system designed for shared learning
The beliefs behind Yzly are not simply statements of intent. They are built into the mechanics of the learning.
Before a workshop is written, a capability is broken down into its foundational skills and behaviours. Research is gathered, compared and used to create a cited, evidence-informed pathway for development. Broad capabilities are then scaffolded into a practical architecture of series, topics, courses and workshops so that people can build skill in manageable steps rather than being overwhelmed by an entire subject at once.
Every workshop lasts approximately thirty to forty-five minutes and follows the same six-phase journey: the Yzly Unified Learning Design Model.
The journey begins with Engage, where participants consider why the subject matters to them and their work. This matters because “you need to know this” is an instruction... not a reason to care.
It then moves into Activate, where people surface what they already know, including their experience, assumptions, habits and questions. Learners do not enter the room empty, and a good system should not treat them as though they do.
During Acquire, participants encounter new research, information and ways of thinking. Knowledge matters, but knowledge alone is not learning, so the workshop moves into Apply, where people have the opportunity to try the skill or behaviour in a focused activity.
They then Assess what happened. The purpose is not merely to decide whether they were right or wrong, but to reflect on what they noticed, what worked, what felt difficult and what they could improve.
Finally, participants Integrate the learning by deciding how they will use it in their work.
The Integrate commitment carries the learning beyond the workshop. People try something, observe what happens, discuss their successes and difficulties, make adjustments and bring that experience back into later conversations and workshops.
Integrate is where the learning leaves the workshop. Activate is where lived experience comes back in.
Over time, this creates a continuing rhythm in which teams learn together, practise in the workplace, reflect together and improve. The workshop is not treated as the finish line. It is part of a larger cycle of behaviour change.
The short duration is not a concession. Each workshop focuses on a specific behaviour, decision or skill rather than compressing an entire capability into a breathless presentation. The depth comes through the sequence and through what happens between sessions.
In the People Series course Emotional Intelligence at Work, for example, a team does not simply attend a broad session on emotional intelligence and declare the matter complete. Participants learn to catch emotional cues earlier, distinguish facts from feelings and stories, pause before responding, reset after a trigger, read another person more carefully, check their empathy and build trust through everyday behaviour.
In the AI Series, another team can move from its first introduction to generative AI through basic prompting, exploration of available tools and a realistic understanding of AI’s limitations.
The subjects are different, but the learning rhythm remains consistent. People understand why something matters, connect it to what they already know, encounter something new, practise, reflect and use it.
Over time, they do more than learn the subject. They learn how to learn.
Making good facilitation possible
A common response to leader-led learning is that leaders are not ready to facilitate it.
They may not be. That is precisely why they need tools and a chance to practise.
People do not become ready by being permanently excluded from the opportunity to begin.
Yzly does not assume that every leader or team member is already an expert facilitator. The facilitator guide teaches the topic as well as the workshop. It provides the necessary background and research, explains the purpose of each phase, offers clear guidance on what to say and when, sets out the activities and debriefs, anticipates common facilitation difficulties and suggests ways to respond.
It also helps teams customise the learning to their circumstances without dismantling the purpose of the design.
The aim is not to make facilitation foolproof. People are wonderfully inventive when presented with a supposedly foolproof system. The aim is to make good facilitation possible for more people, lowering the barrier without lowering the quality.
This approach also recognises the boundaries of the system. Yzly is designed to build workplace capabilities, particularly the human, behavioural, interpersonal and practical skills that help people work well together. It does not pretend that a facilitator guide can replace legal advice, accredited technical instruction, regulated professional expertise or safety-critical training.
Integrity requires knowing where expertise is useful and where its authority ends.
Participation without performance
Every workshop creates several ways for people to take part. Participants may reflect individually, work in pairs, contribute to small groups and join whole-team conversations. This helps prevent the loudest or most senior voice from becoming the only voice, gives people time to think before speaking and creates more than one doorway into the learning.
But participation should not become another performance demanded by authority.
Not everyone processes ideas in the same way. Not everyone can contribute with equal energy on every day. People may be carrying pain, depression, anxiety, exhaustion, neurodivergence, low confidence, language differences or circumstances that are invisible to everyone else.
A humane learning system should not require people to disclose their struggles before it becomes willing to make room for them.
Good design cannot remove everything a person carries, but it can avoid adding unnecessary isolation. It can offer short, focused experiences, different forms of participation and guidance that helps facilitators adapt to the people who are actually present rather than the imaginary, perfectly rested learners who appear in so many design documents.
The purpose is not to lower expectations. It is to create fairer conditions in which more people can meet them.
This is personal for me.
The lack of agency early in my life left me feeling as though I had no place to belong. Being treated as a problem to be controlled made it difficult to imagine myself as a learner with something to contribute.
Yzly is designed around the opposite experience.
A good shared learning experience tells people that their knowledge matters, that uncertainty is permitted, that participation does not require perfection and that they do not have to figure everything out alone.
Learning together can become an act of belonging.
Not the sentimental kind of belonging that appears in a values statement and disappears when the calendar becomes crowded, but the practical kind created when people listen to one another, attempt something difficult, speak honestly about what happened and return to keep improving.
Building the ability to keep learning
Every Yzly program develops the capability being taught, but something else is happening beneath the subject matter.
Each time a team moves through Engage, Activate, Acquire, Apply, Assess and Integrate, it becomes more familiar with the process of learning itself. People begin to ask why something matters, what they already know, what they may be missing, how they can practise, what happened when they tried and what they will do differently next time.
The facilitator gradually becomes less central. Responsibility becomes more distributed. The team becomes more capable of recognising what it needs to learn and less dependent on someone from outside arriving to tell it what to do next.
That is the deeper purpose of Yzly: not simply to build individual capabilities, but to help teams develop the capability to keep building capability.
You can see this happening when the language from the workshops begins to appear naturally in the work. Someone notices that they are treating a feeling as a fact. Someone catches an emotional cue earlier or pauses before responding. A colleague recognises the effort. The team becomes more willing to share successes, speak about challenges and keep practising without waiting for a formal program to tell them that learning is allowed.
The evidence is not merely attendance, completion or a collection of certificates slowly disappearing into an HR system. It is visible in what people notice, say and do differently.
It is visible when people start recognising growth in one another.
Who gets to grow?
This is the question beneath all of it.
Who receives time, attention and investment? Who is treated as capable of change? Who is given a guide, a partner and a real opportunity to practise, and who is handed a login and told to fit development around everything else?
I am not building Yzly because leaders do not deserve good development. I am building it because everyone else does too.
The people closest to customers and everyday delivery deserve meaningful opportunities to grow. So does the new manager trying to support a team without ever having been shown how, the employee whose capability is greater than their confidence, the person carrying a struggle no one around them can see, and the team that wants to improve but does not have a large internal learning function, an expensive consulting budget or a year to wait.
Learning should not be a privilege distributed according to rank. It should not be handed down from those presumed to know to those presumed not to know, nor should it be abandoned to individuals and squeezed into whatever fragments of attention remain.
It should be protected work, shared work and deeply human work.
The maths teacher who told me I would never pass was wrong, but this is not a revenge story. It is a design story.
Change the relationship around learning and the learner may change with it. Change the conditions and possibility begins to appear. Give people time, structure, trust and others to learn beside, and they may reveal capabilities that hierarchy had never thought to look for.
I do not want to replace one hierarchy of knowledge with another. I want to help leaders open the space, give teams the tools to own their development and create learning that becomes less dependent on experts as people become more capable themselves.
That is what we are building at Yzly: learning that is leader-led without being leader-centred, team-owned without leaving individuals unsupported, and rigorous without losing sight of the human beings doing the work.
Not learning handed down.
Learning built together.
Because no one should be written off before the learning has even begun.