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ELE brings leaders together across companies and industries to work through the messy stuff: decisions, risk, handoffs, execution drag, and what it takes to move from idea to action.

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Bring a real bottleneck. Name what's stuck, what's at stake, and why it matters now.

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Signal what matters most. Your vote shapes what this community tackles next.

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Find the peer conversation that moves your work forward.The right exchange builds better leaders, closes capability gaps, and cuts through what internal meetings can't.

Figure out if ELE is for you. Straight answers on what ELE is, who it’s built for, and how contributing members actually work together. Still have a question? Contact us.

Get answers about how Executive Learning Exchange (ELE) works — peer-powered leadership development that fixes real work issues, reverses burnout, and accelerates business value. No programs. No vendors. In the flow of work.

Real challenges. Real peers. Clear next moves.

This is where people-leaders get sharper.

Want ELE to come to you? Propose a local gathering — the community decides what gets scheduled.

Executive Learning Exchange (ELE)

<div style="font-family: 'Calibri', 'Candara', 'Segoe UI', 'Optima', Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.6; max-width: 800px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.1rem;">
<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 20px 0; padding: 10px 20px; background-color: #f8f9fa; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"There's no way in today's crazy busy schedule that a series will actually have the right people." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/dirk-tussing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dirk Tussing</a></blockquote>
The real work the ELE community is moving forward isn't a program refresh — it's a structural shift in how peer intelligence gets built and activated. For years, the community ran on a curated calendar: ELE scheduled, ELE sourced speakers, ELE sent the invites. That model hit a ceiling. What's replacing it is an agile, crowdsourced ecosystem where members surface real challenges, self-organize into focused cohorts, and practice problem-solving together — before they need the answer, not after.
This closing exchange made that shift concrete.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 30px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">Moving the start line</h3>
The community has spent years focused on upskilling topics. The reframe in Milwaukee was sharper: stop waiting for training to begin and move the starting point to the live challenge itself.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"Training doesn't end when the class ends. All we're doing is moving the start line." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/dirk-tussing" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dirk Tussing</a></blockquote>
In practice, this means a practitioner brings a client situation — collected through the Action Planning Worksheet — into a Design Charrette or AI Practical Lab. The community works it in real time. The practitioner walks away with a peer-sourced 30/60/90-day action plan, not a summary deck or a Gartner citation.
It's a different model for how expertise moves. The community becomes the R&amp;D engine, not a backdrop for a speaker.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">Shifting from curated to community-built</h3>
The hardest thing Dirk said in the room wasn't technical. It was this: the curator model he'd run for 20 years had become the bottleneck.
Top-down scheduling couldn't reliably land the right five people in the same virtual room on the same Friday morning. So the new model inverts it. A member with a challenge submits it. The community votes. Once five aligned people opt in, they set the time — not ELE. ELE handles logistics and socialization. The cohort handles the work.
The July through September calendar on the ELE website is intentionally empty. That's not a gap. That's the invitation.
Informal meetups follow the same logic. Two or three people, a conversation starter, a venue (Chicago regulars tend to land at Cooper Hawks). No formal agenda. The community decides what's worth the time.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"We get caught up in our day jobs and this requires an extra move." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/jane-shlaes" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jane Shlaes</a></blockquote>
That extra move — submitting a challenge, adding a meetup, showing up to help someone else's problem — is exactly what builds the ecosystem. It compounds. And it only takes five people to start.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">Renaming the horizon</h3>
Two conference name changes came out of Milwaukee — and they're worth pausing on.
The Milwaukee Conference becomes the ELE Spring Conference. The Chicago event on October 1st at CNA becomes the Fall Talent Intelligence Conference. As Dirk put it plainly: a lot of people in the room aren't from Milwaukee. Geographic names were limiting how the community understood itself and how it showed up to others.
Talent Intelligence is the frame now. Not a location. Not a season. What the community actually does.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">From automated workflows to reasoning — a live build</h3>
One of the sharpest moments in the closing exchange wasn't planned. Community member Kimberly surfaced that she'd told Chris Olson in a breakout that her action item was to learn how to build an agent — and suspected she wasn't alone. She was right.
Chris Olson, co-founder of Scout, built a functioning AI agent live in the room in under two minutes: a corporate buzzword translator, constructed from a single prompt, with tools selected automatically by the platform.
But the demo's real signal was the distinction Chris drew between automated workflows and agents:

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"It moves from giving you information to actually doing work for you." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/chris-olson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Chris Olson</a></blockquote>
Automated workflows are brittle — chain-linked steps that break when one process changes. Agents have reasoning capability. They recognize when something's broken and find another path. They mimic the user's role and permissions rather than operating with unchecked access. They can be evaluated, versioned, and refined over time.
For people leaders watching AI adoption stall inside their organizations, the practical takeaway was direct: start with one repeatable manual task, build a single agent around it, and let it run. The hard part isn't creating it.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"The easy part is creating it, but the hard part is managing it." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/chris-olson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Chris Olson</a></blockquote>
Scout offers a free tier for experimentation. Chris offered continued support to anyone who wanted to keep building after the session wrapped.


<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 40px 0;" />

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-bottom: 15px;">What to try next</h3>
Three moves you can make on the ELE website right now — no event required:

<ol style="padding-left: 25px; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Submit a challenge to the voting board. Go to the ELE website and use the top section of the Action Planning Worksheet format: what's getting stuck at work, and why does it matter now. Once enough aligned members vote in, ELE schedules the cohort. You only need five people and a real problem.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Add a meetup to the summer calendar. July through September is open and community-owned. Name one or two people you'd want to think with, add a conversation starter, and submit it. ELE handles the rest. Informal, no agenda required, often involves a bar tab.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Check and update your ELE portfolio. Every Zoom appearance, question, slide, and contribution is already building a public profile on the ELE site — with highlight reels. If you've been active, the profile exists. Check it, share the URL, and consider adding it to your email signature. It's a personal brand asset most members don't know they already have.</li>
</ol>
<div style="background-color: #f1f4f9; padding: 20px; border-radius: 8px; margin-top: 40px; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">
Bring your work into the room
If this connects to real work you are trying to move forward, bring it into the ELE community. Share the challenge, compare signals with trusted peers, and leave with practical next moves you can use.
Submit My Challenge Now: <a style="color: #0056b3; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;" href="https://www.ele.llc/faqs/share-top-of-mind-talent-challenges">https://www.ele.llc/faqs/share-top-of-mind-talent-challenges</a>

</div>
</div>

What Moves Forward | ELE's Spring Conference 2026 Closing

future of work

Engagement &amp; Culture

Integrated Talent Management

Strategy

Future of Work

Digital &amp; AI

Leadership

dirk.tussing

chris.olson

Talent Strategy

peer-learning

organizational capability

change capability

business speed

wise2026

design charrettes

peer-powered decisions

Signals to Action Planning

insights-wise-2026

workforce challenges

talent models

speed to confident action

practical execution

real-world impact

leadership commitments

strategic choices

execution engine

implementation in action

Human Synergistics

<div style="font-family: 'Calibri', 'Candara', 'Segoe UI', 'Optima', Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.6; max-width: 800px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.1rem;">
Change is no longer an event. It's the environment.
This experiential session drops you into a Human Synergistics survival simulation designed to reveal how your people respond when the stakes are real and the answers aren't obvious. You'll feel firsthand how trust, psychological safety, and collective judgment show up differently in remote and hybrid contexts, and what it takes to cultivate them intentionally. In a world where AI is reshaping how teams work, communicate, and solve problems, the human dynamics at the core of great teamwork matter more than ever. You'll gain practical perspective on leading teams through change, fostering innovation across distributed environments, and creating the conditions that make groundbreaking solutions possible.
And you'll have a great time doing it.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 20px 0; padding: 10px 20px; background-color: #f8f9fa; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">What happens next? This post captures our live framework. In a few days, we will update this page with the real-time breakthroughs, questions, and insights shared by our executive peers during the conference dialogue. Stay tuned!</blockquote>
</div>

Simulation: The Ground is Shifting--How Great Teams Navigate What's Next!|

leadership development

psychological safety

problem solving

adaptability

hybrid teams

Team Dynamics

Strategic Leadership

Trust Building

innovation culture

Organizational Health

michael.kern

cathleen.cooke

Navigating Change

human synergistics

experiential simulation

remote collaboration

collective judgment

communication barriers

distributed workforces

operational effectiveness

behavior patterns

Alter Domus

Precisely

Scout

<div style="font-family: 'Calibri', 'Candara', 'Segoe UI', 'Optima', Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.6; max-width: 800px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.1rem;">
<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 20px 0; padding: 10px 20px; background-color: #f8f9fa; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"The timing of the delivery usually doesn't match the time of the need." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/anton-maletich" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anton Maletich</a>, Alter Domus</blockquote>
Most leadership development programs aren't failing because the content is wrong. They're failing because the moment of delivery is disconnected from the moment leadership is actually tested. People leaders came to this live in-person working exchange wrestling with a concrete problem: how do you move manager development out of the classroom and into the friction points where decisions are made, conversations go sideways, and judgment is required right now — not next quarter?
The work isn't stuck for lack of content. It's stuck because the dominant model is built around cohort schedules, not leader readiness.
Leaders in the conversation
This working exchange brought together Anton Maletich (Alter Domus), Chris Olson (Scout), and Marty Murrillo (Precisely) as co-facilitators — each bringing a different lens from L&amp;D practice, AI product development, and organizational leadership. The real movement in the room came from a genuine three-way exchange between their perspectives and the practitioners around them, not from a single presenter at the front.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 30px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">The gap isn't knowledge. It's timing.</h3>
The room named this fast and kept returning to it. A manager who completed a situational leadership program in May and then faced a real performance situation in October doesn't have a knowledge problem. They have a retrieval problem — because the learning didn't happen anywhere near the work.
One director Anton cited named it plainly:

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"I don't know what I'm supposed to do now that we have AI." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/anton-maletich" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anton Maletich</a>, quoting a director.</blockquote>
That's not a training gap. That's a leader standing at a decision point with nothing in reach. The signal in the room: no amount of better curriculum solves a proximity problem. Development has to move closer to the moment — or it doesn't move at all.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">AI as a coaching layer, not a course replacement</h3>
The most concrete proof point came from Anton's own team. He hired someone — Jesse — on day one with explicit ownership of building, managing, and improving an AI-powered onboarding agent for sellers. No committee. No pilot. Real accountability from the start.
What happened next wasn't planned:

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"The unexpected value is the frontline manager learns from the AI's feedback to their sales rep." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/marty-murrillo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Marty Murrillo</a>, Precisely</blockquote>
The managers watching the agent deliver feedback to new hires started picking up coaching behaviors themselves. The development wasn't programmed into the system. It emerged from proximity to real work. That's a different model entirely — and it suggests AI is most powerful not when deployed as a training tool, but when embedded where the work is already happening.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">The identity problem underneath the skills problem</h3>
A practitioner in the room put her finger on something the discussion had been circling:

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"I didn't get into leadership to lead a thing. I came into leadership because I wanted to help people." — Participant</blockquote>
Leaders who built their identity around developing people are now being asked to manage agents, interpret AI outputs, and make decisions with incomplete data in accelerating timeframes. That shift isn't just a competency update. For many, it's a loss — and until development programs name that loss directly, technical enablement lands on frozen ground.
The discussion pushed further: the resistance people leaders see in their managers often isn't ignorance or laziness. It's a behavior that's still serving them somehow — reducing anxiety, avoiding risk, keeping the peace with the people above them. Coaching through that requires getting curious about what the resistance is protecting, not just training around it.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">The moment of need is the hard part</h3>
Anton closed with the tension that no tool rollout has solved yet:

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"If they have to remember, 'I can go get this to help me,' they never will." — <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/anton-maletich" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anton Maletich</a>, Alter Domus</blockquote>
A manager in a heightened state — feeling attacked, blindsided, or under pressure — is not going to stop and search for a resource. The development that reaches them is the development that's already wired into their workflow. That's not an argument against good content. It's an argument for radical proximity: the right prompt, the right simulation, the right reflection question — available exactly when the situation is active, not after it's resolved.


<hr style="border: 0; border-top: 1px solid #eee; margin: 40px 0;" />

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-bottom: 15px;">What to try next</h3>
<ol style="padding-left: 25px; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Map your curriculum against your last 10 high-stakes manager moments. Pull the actual situations your managers faced in the past 90 days — performance conversations, AI adoption friction, team conflict, handoff failures. Put your current program next to that list. If the material doesn't show up in those moments, that's your redesign brief. Early evidence signal: managers can name a recent situation where they wished they'd had something in reach.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Build one just-in-time prompt for a friction point you know is coming. Pick a specific, recurring situation your managers face — a difficult conversation, a handoff under pressure, an underperformer who isn't moving. Build a custom AI prompt setup they can reach for in the moment, not in preparation for a cohort. Keep it short enough to use in five minutes. Early evidence signal: a manager uses it once without being reminded.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Assign real agent ownership to someone on your team — as a job, not a project. Give one person explicit accountability for building, managing, and improving an AI tool that touches real workflow. Not a pilot. Not a committee. One person, clear ownership, day one. Early evidence signal: they come back with something you didn't design and it's better than what you built.</li>
</ol>
<div style="background-color: #f1f4f9; padding: 20px; border-radius: 8px; margin-top: 40px; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">
Bring this work into the community
If this connects to real work you are trying to move forward — managers who can't reach their development when it matters, AI tools that aren't making it into the flow of work, or leaders navigating an identity shift they weren't prepared for — bring it into the ELE community. Share the challenge, compare signals with trusted peers, and leave with practical next moves you can use.
Submit My Challenge Now: <a style="color: #0056b3; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;" href="https://www.ele.llc/faqs/share-top-of-mind-talent-challenges">https://www.ele.llc/faqs/share-top-of-mind-talent-challenges</a>

</div>
</div>

AI Practical Lab | Leadership Development in the Moment

learning design

anton.maletich

Coaching

marty.murrillo

frontline managers

ai practical lab

AI Adoption

experimentation culture

just in time learning

manager enablement

identity shift

Decision Support

People Leaders

AI In The Flow Of Work

Moment Of Need

Coaching In The Moment

Real Work

CNA Insurance

DX Learning Solutions

ELB Learning

<div style="font-family: 'Calibri', 'Candara', 'Segoe UI', 'Optima', Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.6; max-width: 800px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.1rem;">
The “generation divide” may be the label. The deeper challenge may be disconnection.
After years of isolation, remote habits, and screen-first communication, many teams are rebuilding the muscles of trust, feedback, psychological safety, and real-time collaboration.
This Design Charrette helps people leaders look past generational shorthand and identify what is actually slowing team performance—then work through the signals, risk tradeoffs, and practical actions that help teams reconnect and execute better.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 20px 0; padding: 10px 20px; background-color: #f8f9fa; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">What happens next? This post captures our live framework. In a few days, we will update this page with the real-time breakthroughs, questions, and insights shared by our executive peers during the conference dialogue. Stay tuned!</blockquote>
</div>

Design Charrette | Beyond the Generation Divide

kyle.swanson

performance management

Performance Improvement

brady.bair

Culture Transformation

Design Charrette

angela.howard

feedback loops

bill.crandall

peer collaboration

modern workforce

generational divide

remote habits

screen-first communication

team execution

workplace collaboration

team friction

organizational dynamics

communication strategy

behavioral patterns

leadership choices

workplace isolation

performance barrier

Northern Trust

National Louis University

Summit School Services

<div style="font-family: 'Calibri', 'Candara', 'Segoe UI', 'Optima', Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.6; max-width: 800px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.1rem;">
Most talent decisions feel urgent. And when the stakes are high, urgency can push leaders into hasty, reactive judgment before the right signals are fully understood.
This session introduces a structured reframe for people who make decisions about people: separate the moment you collect workforce signals from the moment you act on them. That sequence — signal before decision — is the core idea behind the Workforce Signal Detector, a practical decision-support model designed to help leaders slow down, notice what is changing, and make better-informed talent decisions.
Think of it as a smoke detector for your talent environment: always scanning, neutral in what it detects, and designed to alert you before the room fills with smoke.
In this 60-minute session, participants will see the model demonstrated through a live talent scenario. We will explore how external workforce data sources such as Lightcast, BLS, WisConomy, and WARN can be used as early-warning signals, and how AI can help flag meaningful workforce changes before leaders are forced into reactive decisions.
This introductory session is designed for HR, talent, learning, workforce, and business leaders who want a more disciplined way to make people decisions. Participants will evaluate the model, discuss its relevance to their own work, and consider whether a deeper follow-up design charrette would be useful for a specific talent or workforce challenge.
If you have ever made a talent decision that looked right in the room but wrong in the rearview mirror, this session is for you.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 20px 0; padding: 10px 20px; background-color: #f8f9fa; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">What happens next? This post captures our live framework. In a few days, we will update this page with the real-time breakthroughs, questions, and insights shared by our executive peers during the conference dialogue. Stay tuned!</blockquote>
</div>

Introduction to Data-Driven People Decisions: A Design Charrette Interest Session

Analytics

newton.moore

jill.mack

haze.samoy

david.scherer

operational efficiency

Artificial Intelligence in HR

Data-Driven Decisions

Predictive Analytics

Business Intelligence

organizational resilience

strategic talent management

talent analytics

talent decisions

workforce signal detector

early-warning signals

decision frameworks

workforce data

reactive leadership

human resources analytics

lightcast data

bureau of labor statistics

wisconomy data

warn notices

LAK Group

Allstate Insurance

Waukesha County Technical College

Marquette University

HumanSide

<div style="font-family: 'Calibri', 'Candara', 'Segoe UI', 'Optima', Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.6; max-width: 800px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.1rem;">
<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 20px 0; padding: 10px 20px; background-color: #f8f9fa; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"For leaders, what we need to be is responsibly curious. Ask questions, be interested, not interesting." — <a style="color: #333; text-decoration: none;" href="https://www.ele.llc/people/michael-grubich" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michael Grubich</a>, LAK Group</blockquote>
The real work in the room
Senior talent leaders, executives, and academic advisors came together to move past the hype and get honest about what AI adoption actually requires — not just tool access, but structural redesign. The work was getting stuck where organizations were overlaying AI onto unchanged roles, skipping the governance architecture that builds real trust, and treating adoption as a communications problem rather than an organizational design problem. It matters now because the window for deliberate design is narrowing: the organizations pulling ahead aren't moving faster — they're moving more intentionally.
Leaders in the conversation
Michael Grubich, President of LAK Group and adjunct faculty at Marquette's College of Business Administration, brought a practitioner's lens on talent strategy and organizational decisions across industries. Peter Hogaboam, Director of Technical Learning and Communications at CNA Insurance, shared live pilot architecture and the nuts-and-bolts of progressive risk assessment. Jim Orheim, Program Director for Executive Education and Professional Development at Marquette University, offered the academic institution's perspective on what enterprises expect from incoming talent. Dr. Phyllis King, Chief Innovation Strategist at Waukesha County Technical College, reframed the literacy-versus-skills distinction that anchored much of the exchange. Lorna Malloy, Strategic L&amp;D Leader at Allstate, brought a Fortune 100 view of AI integration at scale — and the felt reality of how fast organizational mindset can shift. Interactive prompts from practitioners across the room surfaced the environmental friction, the silence masking resistance, and the governance gaps most organizations haven't named yet.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 30px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">AI skills vs. AI literacy — and why the difference will cost you</h3>
<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"There's a difference between AI skills and AI literacy." — <a style="color: #555; text-decoration: none;" href="https://www.ele.llc/people/phyllis-king" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Phyllis King</a>, Waukesha County Technical College</blockquote>
AI skills mean a person can operate a tool. AI literacy means they understand the effect, the ethics, and the responsible intent behind using it. One produces tool competency. The other produces organizational judgment.
Most enterprise training programs are building the former while assuming the latter follows automatically. It doesn't. Organizations that conflate the two are producing workforces that can run AI but can't govern it — and that gap shows up in compliance failures, inconsistent use, and adoption that stalls the moment someone asks a hard question about risk.
The practical implication is structural: foundational training needs to target literacy first, tool fluency second. Jim Orheim described Marquette's College of Business already requiring all faculty and staff to complete ethics, safety, and responsible-use training this summer — not because they're behind, but because they want to set the standard before the pressure arrives from outside.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">Taking the seat — redefining the job, not just the toolset</h3>
<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"They took an organizational approach to it versus a tactical approach." — <a style="color: #555; text-decoration: none;" href="https://www.ele.llc/people/michael-grubich" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michael Grubich</a>, LAK Group</blockquote>
He described a client who stopped all incoming AI tools, stepped back to re-examine every role against business strategy, assessed whether the right people were in position, and then deployed. That sequence — organizational design before tool deployment — is what makes adoption stick.
The panel was direct: top-down AI messaging registers at roughly 4% on the behavior-change iceberg. The real work happens at the middle-manager and frontline-leader layer — and that's exactly where L&amp;D and HR have the deepest reach. Waiting for C-suite clarity to cascade is not a strategy.
When an organization doesn't know how to rewrite roles, update operating norms, or establish communication agreements around AI use, those are not technology problems. They are people-leader problems. The moment to act on that is now.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">The unspoken realities — resistance, the grid, and what's coming</h3>
The sharpest exchange in the room didn't come from the panel. It came from the floor.
A practitioner asked directly: is the environmental impact of enterprise AI data centers part of anyone's governance conversation? The panel's honest answer was largely no — and one leader named it plainly, stating that right now their organization does nothing and doesn't even have a plan yet.
What followed surfaced two signals that most organizations are not yet tracking.
The first is a psychological safety gap hiding in plain sight. Change management practitioners in the room described a dynamic that's easy to miss: people are reading the organizational climate and choosing not to surface real concerns — including environmental and ethical reservations — because they anticipate those concerns being framed as resistance to adoption. The silence looks like buy-in. It isn't. It's suppressed friction that will surface later, at a much higher cost.
The second signal is generational and incoming. Several practitioners noted that a wave of talent is arriving with environmental values baked in as non-negotiables — and that when those employees encounter mandatory AI adoption with no sustainability framework attached, the disconnect will be immediate and visible.
These aren't fringe concerns. They're governance gaps that organizations with mature people-and-culture infrastructure will be better positioned to absorb — and that organizations without it will be caught flat-footed by.


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<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-bottom: 15px;">What to try next</h3>
<ol style="padding-left: 25px; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Audit your training for the literacy gap. Pull your current AI training content and ask one question: does this teach people how to think about AI use, or only how to perform it? If the ethics, intent, and governance dimensions aren't explicitly present, close that gap before the next cohort goes through.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Design a listening mechanism specifically for suppressed resistance. Pulse surveys and skip-level conversations with a direct question about AI concerns — anonymous, low-stakes, framed as input rather than performance assessment — will surface what people aren't saying in public. That signal is more operationally useful than any adoption metric you're currently tracking.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Run one role-redefinition conversation before the next tool deployment. Before any new AI capability goes live on your team, gather the relevant people leaders and ask: if this tool does what it promises, what changes about this role? What stays? What needs to be renegotiated — including expectations, norms, and potentially compensation? That conversation, done once with intention, builds the muscle for doing it at scale.</li>
</ol>
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Bring your real work into the community
If this connects to work you're trying to move forward — a stalled AI rollout, a governance structure that isn't holding, roles that need redesigning, or a room that's gone quiet when it shouldn't — bring it into the ELE community. Share the challenge, compare signals with trusted peers, and leave with practical next moves you can use.
Submit My Challenge Now: <a style="color: #0056b3; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;" href="https://www.ele.llc/faqs/share-top-of-mind-talent-challenges">https://www.ele.llc/faqs/share-top-of-mind-talent-challenges</a>

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Executive Cohort Panel | Framing the Why

michael.grubich

lorna.malloy

peter.hogaboam

Middle Management

jim.orheim

phyllis.king

L&amp;D strategy

AI literacy

dustin.brewer

responsible AI use

executive-cohort

peer intelligence

role redefinition

Organizational Redesign

Governance and Trust

Change Resistance

Systemic Change

Environmental Impact of AI

West Bend Insurance

Journyz

<div style="font-family: 'Calibri', 'Candara', 'Segoe UI', 'Optima', Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; line-height: 1.6; max-width: 800px; margin: auto; font-size: 1.1rem;">
<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 20px 0; padding: 10px 20px; background-color: #f8f9fa; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"The managers weren't really talking about skill gaps anymore… they were uncovering things around friction." -- <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/missy-gonzales" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michelle Gonzales</a>, West Bend Insurance</blockquote>
People leaders across industries are asking the same question right now: how do we prepare people for AI-enabled work? In this featured in-person keynote address at ELE's Spring Conference, <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/missy-gonzales" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michelle Gonzales</a> (Head of Talent at West Bend Insurance) and <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/deepa-kartha" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Deepa Kartha</a> (Founder and CEO of CultureRox &amp; Journyz) brought a critical truth to the surface: the real challenge sits one layer deeper. What their cross-organizational innovation sprint revealed is that organizations aren't just facing a skills problem. They're trying to make sense of work itself as it changes faster than anyone can formally redesign it. Workflows have drifted, decision rights are blurring, and the cognitive cost of navigating that gap is accumulating quietly—mostly in silence..
People shaping the work
The live keynote exchange drew on findings from a five-week innovation sprint conducted earlier in 2026. Participants represented a cross-organizational cohort of practitioners working across talent management, learning and development, and organizational development — each bringing direct experience of AI's pressure on their organizations. The sprint was designed and facilitated through a collaboration between West Bend Insurance and CultureRox/Journyz.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 30px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">The problem underneath the problem</h3>
The sprint started with an assumption the field knows well: AI is creating skill gaps, and L&amp;D needs to close them.
Then the questions changed.
Instead of asking managers "what skills do people need?", the sprint asked: "what has become harder to navigate?" and "where are people hesitating?"
The answers were different. Managers stopped describing skill deficits. They started describing something harder to name — friction, ambiguity, inconsistent judgment, and a growing sense that the rules of the work had shifted without anyone officially saying so.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"We started with questions and used the questions to understand the scenario." -- <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/deepa-kartha" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Deepa Kartha</a>, Journyz</blockquote>
That shift in question design changed everything that followed.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">The 4 signals that surfaced</h3>
What emerged across organizations wasn't a unified skill gap. It was four distinct patterns — each one a signal that work had changed faster than organizations could interpret it.
Risk inflation. The perceived cost of a wrong decision increased — even when actual risk hadn't changed. More escalation. More "just checking" behavior. Slower approvals. Growing dependency on leadership sign-off for calls that used to be made at the front line.
Workaround behavior. When formal workflows stopped fitting reality, people invented unofficial ones. Shadow approvals, undocumented shortcuts, side-channel decisions. A key signal shared during the keynote: people were no longer doing what their job descriptions said they were doing. The work had changed. The official process hadn't caught up.
Uneven adaptation. Some teams moved quickly. Others slowed dramatically — not because of capability differences, but because of structural ones. How a manager interpreted the changes. How clearly expectations had been reset. How much risk tolerance existed on that team. Treating uneven results as a talent problem misses the actual driver entirely.
Decision confidence erosion. Managers began second-guessing decisions they previously made without hesitation. Execution slowed. Escalation inflated. Review cycles multiplied. And beneath all of it, a reframe emerged on stage that stopped people:

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"It is not change management. It is slow digestion of change." -- <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/deepa-kartha" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Deepa Kartha</a>, Journyz</blockquote>
<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">The moment that named what nobody had said out loud</h3>
One of the sharpest observations from the live interactive presentation wasn't a data point — it was an image.
Managers aren't failing to adapt. They're straddling.
Running old workflows and new ones at the same time. Without clarity on which rules apply where. Without organizational acknowledgment that the cognitive load of that dual reality is real, accumulating, and costly.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"We're kind of here in the old world and we're here in the new world." -- <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/missy-gonzales" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michelle Gonzales</a>, West Bend Insurance</blockquote>
The output looks the same. The execution reality does not. And most organizations are detecting that gap late — after performance problems have already appeared, after escalation has already inflated, after the workarounds have already become the unofficial standard.
A collective perspective emerged around what this actually requires: not faster training, not another framework. Something closer to organizational permission — to name what's hard, slow down before designing a response, and treat friction as a signal worth exploring rather than a problem to eliminate.

<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-top: 25px; margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding-bottom: 5px;">A new possibility for L&amp;D</h3>
Here's what the sprint surfaced that most L&amp;D strategies aren't accounting for yet.
L&amp;D practitioners — because of their proximity to people, behavior, and organizational patterns — are already positioned to detect these signals before they become performance problems.
Not by abandoning what they do well. By expanding what they're listening for.
The sprint pointed toward an expanded role: organizational sensing, signal interpretation, behavioral pattern recognition, operational listening. These aren't foreign capabilities for L&amp;D. They're an extended aperture on skills the function already holds — applied earlier, upstream of the intervention.

<blockquote style="border-left: 4px solid #990000; margin: 15px 0; padding: 5px 20px; font-style: italic; color: #555; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">"We're uniquely positioned in L&amp;D to notice where subtle shifts are in the organization." -- <a href="https://www.ele.llc/people/missy-gonzales" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michelle Gonzales</a>, West Bend Insurance</blockquote>
The question the keynote left open: is L&amp;D being asked to do this work? And if not — should it start without being asked?


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<h3 style="font-family: 'Montserrat', sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #1a1a1a; font-size: 1.3rem; margin-bottom: 15px;">What to try next</h3>
<ol style="padding-left: 25px; font-family: 'Calibri', sans-serif; font-size: 1.1rem;">
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Change the first question. Before any upskilling or reskilling initiative, replace "what skills do people need?" with "what has become harder to navigate?" Run that question with five to ten managers. If the answers surface hesitation, inconsistent judgment, or workarounds rather than skill gaps — you're looking at the real problem. That's the early evidence signal.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Map the workarounds before designing the intervention. When people are inventing unofficial processes, the official workflow no longer fits reality. Spend two weeks documenting where shadow approvals, duplicated checks, or undocumented shortcuts are happening. That map is more useful than any needs assessment built on stated skill gaps.</li>
 	<li style="margin-bottom: 15px;">Build a short discovery sprint before committing to a solution. Five weeks of structured inquiry — open-ended questions, behavioral observation, rapid pattern synthesis — can reframe the entire problem definition. The investment is small. The cost of skipping it is designing the wrong solution at full speed.</li>
</ol>
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Bring your version of this into the ELE community
If this connects to real work you are trying to move forward — the escalations that shouldn't be escalating, the workarounds that have quietly become the process, the uneven adaptation nobody has officially named yet — bring it into the ELE community. Share the challenge. Compare signals with trusted peers. Leave with practical next moves you can use.
Submit My Challenge Now: <a style="color: #0056b3; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline;" href="https://www.ele.llc/faqs/share-top-of-mind-talent-challenges">https://www.ele.llc/faqs/share-top-of-mind-talent-challenges</a>

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ELE's Spring Conference: Confidence. Capability. Clarity.

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