You Don't Have a Training Problem: Dr. Christie Vanorsdale on the L&D order-taker trap — The Coordination Tax
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You Don't Have a Training Problem: Dr. Christie Vanorsdale on the L&D order-taker trap

Episode notes

The conversation, captured

Date
August 18, 2026
Participants
Kristian Luoma Christie Vanorsdale

The Coordination Tax is a podcast by In Parallel about what actually breaks down when teams stop sharing the same reality. In this episode, host Kristian Luoma sits down with Dr. Christie Vanorsdale — founder of Vanorsdale Learning Lab, holder of a doctorate in cognitive multimedia learning, and a fractional Chief Learning Officer who has spent 15 years dragging L&D out of order-taker mode. Companies are spending more on training than ever while execution keeps getting worse, and the conversation works through why: L&D is handed content requests instead of business problems, so it solves the wrong problem well. It runs from the order-taker trap and the subject-matter-expert promotion, through the science of working memory, to the IT team that looked like it was failing at product knowledge and wasn't.

Summary

  • The core misdiagnosis: L&D gets treated as a content factory rather than a strategic partner. Someone arrives asking for a course, L&D builds the course, and nobody ever checks whether training was the problem.
  • The subject-matter-expert trap: companies promote the person who knows the most about the work into the role of teaching it, without any background in how people actually learn. Expertise in a subject is not expertise in instruction.
  • Working memory is limited in space AND in time — two constraints, not one. Most training design accounts for neither.
  • The TikTok fallacy: "make it shorter" is the wrong reading of the attention research. Chopping a badly designed module into 60-second pieces does not fix the cognitive load; it just distributes it.
  • L&D isn't at the strategy table, so it never hears the business goal — only the requested deliverable. When it is at the table, it becomes the translator across organizational silos, because it's the one function that talks to everybody.
  • Measurement: completion rates measure attendance, not effect. Tie L&D to the business goal it was meant to move, and you can finally tell whether it worked.
  • The IT specialists story: a team was 'failing at product knowledge' until Christie went and asked them. They had never been trained on who was on the other end of the phone — the real gap was customer knowledge, not product knowledge.
  • The close: run a discovery process before designing a single module. Talk to the people doing the work, not just the person who requested the training.

What was discussed

The "order taker" problem

Key insight
  • L&D is handed content requests — "we need a course on X" — instead of business problems, and delivers exactly what was asked for.
  • The cost is quiet: the training ships, the requester is satisfied, and the underlying performance problem is untouched.
  • Treating L&D as a strategic partner means it gets to ask what outcome is supposed to change before anything gets built.

The subject-matter expert trap

Key insight
  • Companies promote their best practitioner into the training role, assuming that knowing the work means knowing how to teach it.
  • Instructional design is its own discipline — grounded in how people learn — and it doesn't come bundled with subject expertise.
  • The result is content that reflects how an expert thinks, not how a novice learns.

Working memory is limited in space and in time

Key insight
  • Two constraints, not one — most training design accounts for neither.
  • Christie's doctorate is in cognitive multimedia learning, and this is the mechanism underneath most "the training didn't stick" complaints.

The TikTok fallacy

Highlight
  • "Make it TikTok-length" is the wrong conclusion to draw from attention research.
  • Slicing a badly designed module into 60-second pieces redistributes the cognitive load rather than reducing it.

Why L&D isn't at the strategy table

Story
  • Excluded from strategy conversations, L&D never hears the business goal — only the deliverable someone has already decided on.
  • That exclusion is what makes order-taking the default operating mode.

L&D as the translator across organizational silos

Key insight
  • L&D talks to every function, which makes it unusually well placed to carry context across silos.
  • Used properly, it's a translation layer between parts of the company that no longer share the same picture.

When an emerging scaleup should engage L&D

Story
  • The timing question for mid-market scaleups — when the informal way of passing knowledge along stops holding.

How to actually measure L&D working

Key insight
  • Completion rates measure attendance, not effect.
  • Measure against the business goal the training was meant to move, and effectiveness becomes visible.

The IT specialists story — a real misdiagnosis

Highlight
  • A team of IT specialists was reported as "failing at product knowledge," and the request was for more product training.
  • Christie went and asked them. They had never been trained on the customers on the other end of the phone.
  • The real gap was customer knowledge — the requested training would have solved a problem the team didn't have.

Closing advice: run a discovery process first

Highlight
  • Before designing a single module, run discovery — talk to the people doing the work, not only the person who filed the request.
  • Most training problems turn out not to be training problems.

Links

Dr. Christie Vanorsdale on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christievanorsdale-learning

Vanorsdale Learning Lab: vanorsdalelearninglab.com/services

The Coordination Tax Index 2026: download the report

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