iSpring L&D Leadership Series: New York

Anna opens with the idea the whole day rests on: the strongest results iSpring sees among its clients do not come from better content. They come from L&D changing how it works within the company. She lays out the three shifts the program will explore — stakeholder conversations, business insight, and cross-functional projects — introduces the speakers as people who have made those changes in real organizations, and sets up the research presented at the end of the day as the result.

A first-person account of the transition this program is about: joining a function expected to take orders and turning it into one that defines the problem. Bobby covers what the first weeks looked like, which conversations came first, what had to be refused, how credibility was built before there were any results to show, and what the rest of the business had to see before it started bringing problems instead of requests. The awkward parts stay in — including the moment he admitted to senior leaders that he didn't yet know the answer.

The practitioners on this program each made this shift within a single company. This session looks at the broader pattern behind their experiences. Drawing on more than a decade of convening one of the profession’s largest practitioner communities, David Kelly traces the same shift across the field: the teams that broke through stopped optimizing content and started changing where they sit, whom they talk to, and what they take responsibility for — while the teams that didn't are running better courses with the same flat results. He identifies what actually moves a function from executor to orchestrator, what the market now rewards, and why “the business is not standing still” makes this a lasting change in the role rather than a passing phase. It sets the context for the day: the examples that follow aren't exceptions. They're early signs of where the whole function is heading.

L&D is usually the last function to hear about a business problem and the first to be handed a solution. This session is about reversing that order in practice. The speaker walks through two situations she was in where she had no authority to draw on: a new function with no definition of what it owned, and a problem her team could solve with a tool nobody was going to fund. In both cases she went and found the business problem before anyone brought it to her, and brought evidence when she asked for the thing she needed. Attendees work both situations in small groups before hearing what she did, and leave with a way to make the case for budget, headcount, and a say in what gets built, without waiting for the next planning cycle.

Anna Poli presents iSpring’s second annual ROI study — 140+ learning professionals across 5 regions and 15+ in-depth interviews — as the answer to the question the day has been building toward. Only 11% of teams can connect a program to a measurable business result, and the study shows that the difference isn't the tools. It comes down to whether the problem was defined with stakeholders before anything was built, whether a baseline existed, whether line managers were part of the measurement process, and whether learning data was ever compared with business data. The session examines one or two client examples in full — what the L&D team changed about its own way of working first and what the business saw afterward — and gives attendees the six-layer playbook as a practical continuation of the two talks that preceded it.