The Perfect L&D Professional Association: A List of Aspirations

by Will Thalheimer

This blog post originally appeared on the HPT Treasures website (https://hpttreasures.wordpress.com/) on November 21, 2020 and is reproduced here with permission from Guy Wallace. Special thanks to Guy Wallace for his amazing and generous contributions to the workplace learning field! The article is modified slightly to make it relevant to the LDA website.

What do YOU want in a learning & development professional association? Or a performance-improvement association? Or whatever kind of professional association? I’ve been involved in dozens of professional organizations, many times as a member, more times as a speaker, and too many times as a forgotten customer. I’m sure you have too! What do you like? What drives you nuts? What thrills you? What makes you shake your head in exasperation?

I’m starting a professional membership organization now with my podcast brother, my conference co-organizer, the thrilling and amazing Matthew Richter (business partner with the legendary Thiagi). We are planning on doing a few things differently. The name of the community will be the Learning Development Accelerator (or LDA). I’ll share some of our aspirations at the end of this post, but I’d love to hear what you think.

Let me first brainstorm some Do-NOT-Wants. I’ll do that in list form. Then, after the list, I’ll share my vision for what a great professional organization might look like. After that, I hope that you’ll share what you would add and what you might subtract from my thoughts.

Professional Association Do-NOT-Wants

Led by people who care more about money than the profession or the members.
Led by people who are not fair or ethical.
Led by people who pay themselves millions of dollars a year, while not providing important services to their members/customers.
Pay $100,000+ for celebrity keynotes, while not paying L&D experts and top-flight practitioners anything, except maybe travel expenses.
No diversity in speakers, workshop leaders, thought leaders, etc.
Leadership by committee, ensuring nothing gets done.
Stuck in tired paradigms, not open to new ideas.
Using poor learning designs in their programming.
Books for sale only include their own published books, not important books for the field.
Lack of responsibility for its own mistakes and oversights.
Corruption among the leadership.
Pay-to-be-selected awards.
Encouragement of learning myths, like learning styles.
Lack of innovation.
Lack of investment in fair and meaningful research.
Willingness to disappear research results if they are unfavorable.
Not providing real value for the membership fee, just providing fluff, dubious info, pablum.
Not caring about the validity, importance, or relevance of the content shared.
Caring more about vendors, sponsors, investors than professionals in the field.
Seeing those paying fees only as customers, not as true members of a community.
Having a business model that is not sustainable.
Having a marketing approach that doesn’t work, year after year, leading to permanent membership loss.
Competing with organizations in the field, but producing lower-quality products at a higher price.
Not valuing thought leaders, for example by offering their workshops without even acknowledging the creators and hosts of those workshops.
Not paying their providers — speakers, workshop leaders, book writers, etc. — a reasonable fee for their services.
Supporting popular thought leaders in lieu of supporting people who are producing better stuff.
Not nurturing young and new members of the L&D field.
Not working to improve the professionalism in the field.
Filled with members whose bitter dogmatism turns people away instead of embracing all of us as seekers and learners.

Professional Association Wants

I want to be a member of an organization that is led by people who care about the L&D profession and the people in the profession. I want to know that the organization and its leadership will fight for me and for best practices and for professionalism. I want to know the organization is well run, that the revenues are reinvested in the organization and are not bloated to the leader or leadership.

I want to be a member of an organization that creates a true community, where expertise is revered but not worshiped blindly, where everyone feels a responsibility to share their wisdom, to give back, to organize and professionalize. I want to be a member of an organization that seeks diversity in all its forms, that reaches out across the world, that represents the full spectrum of our profession in the voices it puts forward.

I want to be a member of an organization that embraces science, and evidence, and evaluation data–that believes inquiry and curiosity and truth are to be valued. I want a professional organization that encourages exploration, experimentation, and learning–that is not dogmatic but enthusiastic for the process of scientific inquiry and deliberate practice. I want to be a member of an organization who will enlighten me in ways I hadn’t considered.

I want to be a member of a professional organization that sees stakeholders as partners–as people worthy of creating partnerships with, people deserving of shared benefits. I want an organization that will think of me and my fellow members as important, that will look at our careers and jobs and situations and fight for us where we are being undervalued or taken advantage of. I want to be a member of a professional organization that demonstrates in tangible ways that it cares for the profession and the professionals in that profession.

I want to be a member of a professional community that wants to lift L&D to a higher plane of influence, to more professionalism, higher standards, a heightened sense of our ethical responsibilities, to radically improved effectiveness.

I want it all.

And yet, I know it’s not easy.

What do You Want?

What do you want in a professional organization? Leave your comments below!

The Learning Development Accelerator

Every organization must focus. As Matt and I build the Learning Development Accelerator, along with a stellar board of advisors—and with people like you—we begin with these priorities:

Establishing a community that supports research-aligned practices.
Supporting members’ needs and providing the resources that will help them personally.
Serving L&D professionals as a priority, rather than first focusing on advertisers, investors, vendors.
Avoiding practices and alliances that derail objectivity or push the focus away from membership support.
Working to improve and sustain the learning and development field.
Supporting professional development and professionalism.
Being a truly diverse and global community.

We have formalized our values and approach at this URL: https://ldaccelerator.com/our-approach

What do You Want?

I ask this twice because I’d love to learn from you. I assume, if you’re coming to the LDA website (or the HPT Treasures Website), that you are a thoughtful professional. I want to learn what would resonate with you so that I can help build a useful professional organization.