Why community is a strategic solution, not a cure-all with Anamaria Dorgo

#11 with Anamaria Dorgo, L&D Manager at Adyen and Founder of the L&D Shakers community. Many organisations still treat the course as the default unit of learning, even though the evidence says it no longer holds up. Anamaria makes the case for communities of practice inside organisations — a practical, measurable way to help people make sense of constant change together — and shares the business case she uses to win leaders over, alongside an honest view of what a community can and cannot fix.

Other themes in this episode include:

• A business case that holds up: Anamaria shares the evidence she reaches for when leaders ask for proof — billions spent on training, low application rates, and the shrinking shelf life of skills — and why a small pilot makes the case faster than a deck.
• Starting with why, not the platform: Why launching a Slack channel or buying a community tool is the last step, not the first. Interviews, focus groups, and a clear desired outcome come before any format decisions.
• Co-create or enable: The distinction between top-down communities, which must be co-created with members, and bottom-up ones, which L&D should stoke rather than absorb into a programme.
• Facilitation as the underestimated skill: Why ritual design, prompts, psychological safety, and the ongoing work of keeping a conversation alive are consistently undervalued — and rarely resourced as part of someone's actual role.
• AI as a third colleague: How Anamaria's team treats their AI assistant as an extra team member that summarises, researches, and pokes holes in thinking, while humans keep judgment, context, and emotion.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction to community-led learning
[00:45] Anamaria's role at Adyen and the L&D Shakers community 
[02:28] Daily learning habits: podcasts and a curated LinkedIn feed
[03:30] Unlearning busyness as a measure of success
[04:34] Turning points that shaped a belief in social learning 
[07:19] Distributed learning: why L&D doesn't need to be in the room 
[09:03] Making the business case for social learning 
[11:52] Why courses go stale faster than ever
[14:00] Case study: communities of practice in retail at Ace & Tate
[19:29] Ripple effects: confidence, promotions, and employee NPS
[22:44] How to start a community that actually works
[25:40] Co-created versus enabled communities
[26:28] Securing leadership sponsorship
[27:48] The pitfall of underestimating facilitation
[29:11] What people come together for in a world of content overload
[33:18] Bringing AI into collaboration
[35:26] Facilitation as a strategic capability
[39:51] The skills L&D leaders need next
[42:05] Final reflections and closing

Takeaways

• Start with the why, not the tool: A platform is not a community, and engagement is the last thing to arrive, not the first. Validate the need through real conversations before you design a single format.
• Align the how with the why: If the goal is more innovation, an expert webinar won't get you there. Whatever happens inside the community needs to drive people towards the change you're actually after.
• Don't underestimate a good anecdote: When quantitative data isn't available, stories of how being in a community changed someone's day-to-day are valid evidence — and they travel further with leaders than you'd expect.
• Facilitation is the strategic skill: As AI takes over content creation, L&D's value shifts to creating conditions for learning, helping teams surface what's unsaid, and making sense of complexity together.

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