When Life becomes the Teacher (7): Why Organizations Are Asking for Transformation Support, Not Training

Most of the change models we still teach were not designed for a world of permanent AI-driven hashtag#disruption.

Having shared my reflections on how hashtag#AI is impacting the StrengthMiner® Consulting LLP team and the learning & development industry more broadly, I want to take the conversation one step further.

Today, I’d like to talk about how training needs themselves are changing. For a long time, the primary question in L&D was how to deliver learning:

- in-person or virtual
- classroom or blended
- synchronous or asynchronous

The choice was largely driven by content - much of it well established, sometimes for decades, sometimes renewed or repackaged, but fundamentally known.  What we are sensing very clearly now is a shift.

Our clients are no longer asking primarily for content delivery.
They are asking for cultural rewiring in response to AI and the paradigm shifts that come with it.  This is no longer about teaching established concepts.  It is about helping people and organizations cope with speed, uncertainty, and continuous disruption - and to find new inner and collective responses to that reality.

One concrete example:
A client recently asked us to completely rework our Leading Change offering - specifically for leading change in times of AI.
And this is where many traditional change models start to struggle.

Models like the Kübler-Ross change curve, rooted in grief research, assume a certain duration of change. They implicitly rely on the idea that people have time to move through recognizable phases.  But what happens when change cycles become so short that you never fully complete one before the next begins?

In such environments, linear change models lose explanatory and practical power. What becomes more relevant are cyclical approaches to change - many of which originated in the IT world: hashtag#agile, iterative learning, continuous feedback loops

Agile matters more than ever because it acknowledges permanent change as the norm, not the exception.  At the same time, I find myself wondering whether behavioural and organizational change research has truly kept pace with this acceleration. Many models we still teach were not designed for a world of constant AI-driven disruption.

So, I want to open this up for discussion.

What change models are you finding useful today?
Where do you see limits in the frameworks we continue to teach?
And what do you believe still holds - even as everything speeds up?

I’m genuinely curious to hear how others are thinking about this.

Context about image: Yayoi Kusama at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, CH: “The Hope of the Polka Dots Buried in Infinity”