You Don't Have a Training Problem: Dr. Christy Vanorsdale on the L&D order-taker trap

Companies are spending more on training than ever. So why does execution keep getting worse? Dr. Christy Vanorsdale — founder of Vanorsdale Learning Lab, cognitive multimedia learning researcher, and fractional Chief Learning Officer — explains why L&D keeps solving the wrong problems, and what happens when you treat it as a strategic partner instead of an order taker. Christy has spent 15 years dragging L&D out of order-taker mode and into being a strategic partner for business. She holds a doctorate in cognitive multimedia learning and today runs Vanorsdale Learning Lab, working with mid-market scaleups and B2C training companies to redesign their learning ecosystems from the ground up. In this conversation, Christy walks through why most L&D teams get treated as content-makers rather than strategic partners — and why that misdiagnosis quietly costs companies. She unpacks the "order taker" problem, the trap of promoting subject-matter experts into training roles when they lack a background in how people actually learn, why working memory is limited in space AND time (and why the "make it TikTok-length" fallacy is wrong), how to measure L&D effectiveness through business goals rather than completion rates, and the true story of the IT specialists who were "failing at product knowledge" — until she went and asked them, and it turned out the real problem was they'd never been trained on the customers on the other end of the phone. She closes on the discovery process every L&D leader should run before designing a single module. 📥 Download the Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordinat... CHAPTERS [00:00] Cold open + intro [00:57] The "order taker" problem [03:21] The subject-matter expert trap [08:44] Working memory — limited in space and time [13:21] The TikTok fallacy [16:02] Why L&D isn't at the strategy table [19:59] L&D as the translator across organizational silos [20:47] When an emerging scaleup should engage L&D [22:22] How to actually measure L&D working [26:00] The IT specialists story — a real misdiagnosis [29:55] The discovery process every L&D leader should run Guest & show links: Dr. Christy Vanorsdale on LinkedIn:   / christievanorsdale-learning   Vanorsdale Learning Lab: https://www.vanorsdalelearninglab.com... Coordination Tax Index 2026: https://www.in-parallel.com/coordinat...