Escaping L&D tunnel vision: Smarter paths for learning leaders

How do you know if your L&D team has slipped into tunnel vision? When the same mindsets, metrics, and default solutions keep showing up – even as the business around you changes.

In this episode of Learning at Large, we’re joined by Mark Sheppard, Diagnostic Learning & Development Lead at General Motors, who’s spent 35 years exploring how to break free from the L&D echo chamber. He shares practical ways to challenge your own assumptions, borrow smarter ideas from other disciplines, and build politically savvy strategies that make a real business impact.

Watch the full podcast video

Top tips for escaping L&D tunnel vision

Don’t have time to listen now? Here’s a quick summary of what you’ll learn in this episode:

• Recognize the signs – Challenge routine habits and ask whether your work still solves the right problems.
• Borrow smarter ideas from outside L&D – Look beyond learning for better ways to define value, solve problems, and measure success.
• Start small to build influence – Prove value through small, data-driven wins that earn credibility.
• Avoid “emergency visibility projects” – Resist quick fixes that look good but add no real performance value.
• Champion meaningful work – Advocate for quality, creativity, and autonomy to unlock real innovation.
• Stay relentlessly curious – Keep challenging old habits and evolve your practice with every project.

1. Recognize the signs

Mark warns that L&D’s biggest obstacle isn’t a lack of skill – it’s a lack of perspective. When teams fall into familiar patterns, they risk losing touch with business realities. He urges leaders to pause and ask whether their work is truly solving problems or simply repeating what’s always been done.

“Tunnel vision is a really good way to put it. You get stuck in this loop of, ‘We’ve always done it this way,’ and it becomes very hard to step outside that.”

2. Borrow smarter ideas from outside L&D

To break free from the loop of sameness, Mark encourages leaders to look to disciplines like marketing, product design, and IT for new thinking. Borrowing proven frameworks and approaches helps L&D define value and drive real change.

“The more you are bringing the outside inside, the more valuable you become to the organization.”

3. Start small to build influence

Influence doesn’t come from waiting for permission – it comes from results. Mark suggests starting small: run experiments, measure impact, and show how better learning design drives performance. Those early wins earn political capital that opens doors for bigger change.

“Take an upcoming project and try to do the right thing differently – then present it as a data-gathering activity to validate a meaningful improvement.”

4. Avoid “emergency visibility projects”

When pressure hits, it’s tempting to chase quick wins that boost visibility but add little value. Mark calls these emergency visibility projects – costly distractions that waste time and energy. Instead, focus your resources on projects that create sustainable performance improvement.

“EVPs are the single-use plastics of L&D. They use a lot of resources and provide only superficial value, if any.”

5. Champion meaningful work

Breaking out of tunnel vision isn’t just about mindset – it’s about advocacy and trust. Mark calls on L&D leaders to fight for meaningful, performance-driven work and to empower their teams to do it right. Micromanagement kills creativity, but trust fuels innovation and engagement.

“L&D leaders need to become fierce advocates for doing meaningful work, not just content creation… There’s probably a lot of idea generation and creativity being suppressed by this content meat grinder.”

6. Stay relentlessly curious

Curiosity keeps L&D evolving. Mark believes the best leaders are never satisfied – they keep questioning their methods, metrics, and assumptions to find smarter, faster, more human ways of doing things.

“When leaders look at their solutions and realize they haven’t changed in five to ten years, they need to say, ‘Enough is enough, let’s start working on incremental change.’”

About Mark

Mark is a seasoned learning professional with over 35 years’ experience spanning military, healthcare, IT, and corporate learning. Now leading learning for specialist engineers at General Motors, he’s passionate about meaningful, performance-driven design that challenges the status quo.

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn.

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