Growth Engineering

23/09/2026

The GE team spent yesterday at AI Summit Barcelona, and four sessions stood out because they all came back to how people learn.

Christian Rebernik (Tomorrow University) made the case that learning is the infrastructure AI change runs on.
Roberta Scrofani (ELEVATE) ran a workshop on Human Literacy.
The Rebuilding the Org Chart panel looked at roles, upskilling and leadership readiness.
Daniel Traça (Esade) spoke about the responsibility education carries in an AI future.

One thread ran through all four: AI moves fast, and brains learn at their own pace. Design for both and you get the best of each.

Day two is on. Which session would you add to the list?

16/09/2026

Four sessions at AI Summit Barcelona we're watching closely, and why.

Learning Is the New Infrastructure — Christian Rebernik, Tomorrow University
The session argues that AI transformations don't fail on the technology. They fail because the organisation can't learn at the same speed it's being asked to adopt.

The Human Side of AI Transformation — Roberta Scrofani, MBA, Founder, ELEVATE
Her term is Human Literacy, the missing half of every AI strategy. Fifteen years decoding human behaviour in the attention economy, now turned toward AI.

Rebuilding the Org Chart — Zakaria Mansour(Bsport), Małgorzata Łuszkiewicz (Capgemini), Anita Perera (Accenture), Fiona Garvey (Softonic), Laura Tejada Sáenz (WAVVEUP)
The panel covers which roles get redrawn, what upskilling actually costs, and why leadership readiness fails before the tooling does.

AI & Education — Daniel Traça, Director General, Esade
A leading voice on how business education needs to evolve to prepare leaders for an AI-driven world. Session content has not been published yet.

22 to 23 September, WTC Barcelona.
Anyone we've missed that should be on this list?

15/09/2026

AI can improve your performance and wreck your self-assessment at the same time.

A 2026 study had people answer reasoning questions with ChatGPT's help. Scores improved by about 3 points, but people guessed they'd got roughly 17 out of 20 right.

The real average was closer to 13.

The researchers' own conclusion: the problem isn't AI helping, it's AI that hands you the answer without ever asking you to explain your thinking back.

Zavmo teaches through conversation, not multiple choice. Understanding has to be demonstrated, not just received.

Check out Zavmo: https://zavmo.ai/
Study: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2025.108779

09/09/2026

Your gut is quietly involved in forming memories. 🫁

USC researchers found a direct nerve pathway running from the gut to the brain's memory centre.

Found in rats so far, but the same chemical this pathway boosts is one of the first things to break down in Alzheimer's.

08/09/2026

You don't need a team to lead one.

That's Laura Overton's argument in The L&D Leader, the book she co-wrote with Michelle Ockers: leadership isn't about headcount, it's something anyone can do from day one in the industry, no title, no direct reports.

Harry Cloke sat down with her for the full episode, out now: https://youtu.be/MRLqhSg_Yjk?si=pE_KPaGB6FQl7F-2

03/09/2026

🤔 We don't learn like kids do.

In 1968, Malcolm Knowles put a name to it: children learn because they're told to, adults learn because they've decided to.

He called it andragogy.

He was right about the split.
He just didn't have the tools to explain why, motivation changes what the brain actually encodes.

Mandatory or chosen: which training actually stuck?

02/09/2026

📅 Training doesn't get tested the day it happens. It gets tested the day you're back at the desk, when whoever sat through it either does something differently, or doesn't.

Be honest: how much of your last training changed what you did the next day?

More here: https://www.growthengineering.co.uk/learning-transfer/

01/09/2026

Laura Overton spent 15 years leading Towards Maturity, the industry's longest-running L&D benchmark, drawing on data from over 10,000 learning leaders.

Midway through, she went straight to the workers instead. A five-year study, over 50,000 people, apprentice to director.

What they called learning didn't match what L&D called learning.

In this episode, Laura tells Harry Cloke about TRI (the practice she distilled from her research), BOLD (the mindset underneath it), the Polynesian star navigators who reshaped how she thinks about leading through uncertainty, and why she thinks AI is pushing L&D from producer to enabler. She's also co-author of The L&D Leader, written with Michelle Ockers.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/MRLqhSg_Yjk

27/08/2026

Give someone a bullet point: "Report suspicious emails within 24 hours." They'll forget it by lunch.

Tell them about Sarah instead: she opens an email, something feels off, and she reports it before anyone else even notices. They'll remember what she noticed, and what she did about it.

Chip Heath ran a classroom exercise at Stanford testing exactly this. 63% remembered the story a week later. 5% remembered the identical point told as a stat.

The story was never the point. What it encodes is.

Have you ever told a story to make a point land, instead of just stating it?

Full science here: https://www.growthengineering.co.uk/neuroscience-of-storytelling/

25/08/2026

You don't really know something until you have to teach it.

Preparing to explain it forces you to organise it, spot the gaps, and work out what you'd actually get asked.

All before you've said a word.

Ever taught a new starter and realised halfway through you didn't fully get it either?

Read more: https://hubs.la/Q04v9hMj0

The generation effect and elaboration explain why producing beats receiving. Discover the science of active learning and how to design training that sticks.