LESS EXPERT, MORE EXPLORER.

The sun finally came out for us after a nervous week watching the forecast … the skies were blue over Brunel’s historic SS Great Britain in Bristol for our Talent Forum summer event – a very fitting venue for a day of exploration!  There is something about standing on a ship built to sail into the unknown that makes a theme land before anyone has said a word.

And exploration really was the theme of the day. From the opening session through to the final table discussion, it came back to one simple shift in posture – less expert, more explorer. Experts carry maps. Explorers carry compasses. We sent everyone home with a small compass, a symbol. That is the part that stuck…“A nice reminder that it’s okay not to have the full map.”

The day started with two questions…

‘What is the thing you feel most expert in right now?’ and ‘How would it feel if that expertise were obsolete within eighteen months?’

The latter, an uncomfortable question, and that’s the point – expertise still matters. But authority is moving from what we know towards how we judge, and the job increasingly is to move towards uncertainty rather than wait for it to be clear.

From there we looked at what we can see up ahead, and why communities of learners help with all of it.

First up was AI and critical thinking. The research we shared (Microsoft and Gerlich, both 2025) points to an uncomfortable pattern – the more we lean on AI, the less we tend to exercise our own judgement. AI speeds the work up, but our capability can erode when we stop thinking for ourselves. The phrase we kept returning to was ‘mind before machine’. One attendee framed the question better than our slides did – ‘How do we make sure we are using AI to support our thinking, not replace it?’

Second was the human connection gap, and it was clearly a topic people felt most personally. Learning is social, and the conditions for it have changed. We talked about designing for connection on purpose rather than leaving it to chance – through peer cohorts, reverse mentoring, and the accidental encounters that used to happen on their own. As one person reflected afterwards – “It’s something we’re all feeling in different ways,” and a real challenge for L&D and early careers teams.

That fed naturally into intergenerational working, a session with real warmth and honesty. We now have five generations in the workplace. A favourite moment was a run of ‘the youth of today’ complaints stretching back to Hesiod in 700 BC and Aristotle not long after – a useful reminder that despairing of the next generation is hardly a new invention. The heart of it, though, was the simple stuff – taking time to understand each other, adapting how you work with different people, communicating with intent, and building places where people feel safe to speak up.

Our own ‘TempCheck’ research (495 responses) surfaced a telling gap – early-career professionals arrive wanting to lead and navigate conflict, while their managers are still waiting for them to master the basics of communication. They are not always agreed on what ‘business-ready’ looks like.

The afternoon brought all of this to life. Our client Otsuka’s intern programme showed what early talent can do when they are treated as contributors rather than observers and prompted a frank discussion about what holds the rest of us back from doing the same.

We closed with an engaging and interactive session on navigating L&D in genuinely uncertain times, and the case for L&D to step up as a strategic explorer – building capability with and through its communities. The evidence backs the instinct – organisations that invest in developing their people are over four times more likely to outperform their peers.

What stays with me, though, is how open the conversations were. One participant wrote “No-one pretending they’ve cracked it, just people sharing ideas and experiences honestly.”— that is the Talent Forum in a nutshell. None of us has the full map. But together, we have a decent set of compasses.

So, thank you to everyone who came, shared, and disagreed together. If you left with better questions rather than tidy answers, that was the idea!

We would love to know where your next quest takes you – and if you missed this one, the door is always open. That is what the community is for.