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🏛️ A Field Guide for the Skeptical Practitioner

This publication exists for people who are trying to make real change happen in real organizations — and who keep running into ideas, models, or frameworks that don't hold up.If you've ever asked:

Why is coaching so credential-obsessed?

Who decided adult learning should feel like theater?

What exactly is being measured in leadership development?...then you're in the right place.

⚙️ What You'll Find Here

Unlearning Learning is structured like a cabinet of oddities — a collection of essays, artifacts, and commentaries arranged to provoke inquiry, not deliver dogma.

Coaching Deconstructed — What the credentialing machine doesn't want you to notice

Myth of the Weak — A weekly look at popular nonsense in the people sciences

A Learning Lab — Real-world experiments and case studies from the field

Advents in Adult Learning — Tools and frameworks that actually work

Tech That Teaches — AI, platforms, and what we're building next

📚 Who's Behind This?

I’m Leslie Taylor, a longtime international consultant in leadership, coaching, and talent development across Asia-Pacific. For over two decades, I worked with HR leaders and executives of Fortune 500 firms to design people strategies that aligned with business goals — not just locally, but globally. In Tokyo and the broader APAC region, I tested Western frameworks under pressure. Some adapted. Some collapsed. Some were quietly ignored. Over time, I grew skeptical of the endless stream of imported fads — from DEI templates to resilience programs — and began dissecting what actually worked, and why so little of it traveled well.

This Substack is part field diary, part critique, and part curiosity cabinet for those who’ve been there too.

🗂️ The Misfit Exhibit

Inside this Cabinet, you’ll find whole drawers of imported solutions that didn’t quite survive the journey. A few common species:

🧭 Wrong Place, Wrong Problem — Global programs that collapsed under cultural mismatch

🧠 Breakthrough or Breakdown? — Introspective offsites and coaching tech repackaging therapy as productivity

🧽 The Soft Stuff — Resilience and wellness programs that fixed nothing but the marketing deck

🌿 Virtue Flavored — CSR and DEI efforts that signaled values more than solved anything

Some were just ill-fitting. Some were quietly dangerous. Most were expensive. Few were questioned. Here, they’re tagged, mounted, and opened for inspection.

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🚫 What This Isn’t

It’s not a productivity hack blog.

It’s not a self-coaching echo chamber.

It’s not performance art for algorithms.

This is a place for critical reflection, curiosity, and professional dissent.

🗝️ About Subscriptions

Subscribe for free to get new essays weekly.

Support the project as a paid subscriber, if you feel moved to.

Comment if you're a practitioner with war stories, questions, or heresies of your own.

Thanks for stepping into the Cabinet!

— Leslie

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