The 2026 FIFA World Cup is underway, bringing together top footballing talent from across the globe.
Managers such as Thomas Tuchel have taken a group of players, many of whom are stars in their own clubs, and asked them to adapt at speed to a new setup, new teammates and the pressures of a tournament that keeps changing shape as it goes.
Of course none of this is left to chance. The adaptability we admire on the pitch is the product of deliberate work by the manager, their support team and the players themselves. Including preparation, rehearsal, analysis, honest feedback and a coaching setup designed to develop it.
That distinction should spark the interest of anyone working in learning and development. Because building learning agility is precisely our job.
Learning agility is the ability to learn from experience and apply it in new, unfamiliar situations.
I would say that it is one of the most sought-after capabilities in any workforce, at a time when the world of work is in a constant state of flux. Yet Korn Ferry estimates that only around 15 per cent of people are highly agile.
The encouraging news for L&D is that much like a national football team’s ability to reshape itself mid-tournament if something is going wrong, this can be built, provided you design it on purpose.
Here are six concepts that can help you begin this deliberate work of building learning agility:
1. Make stretch the norm, not the reward
World Cup footballers develop agility by being asked to operate outside their comfort zone. For example, Kimmich, Germany’s captain, plays as a central midfielder for Bayern Munich, the No. 6 anchoring the team.
For Germany he plays at right-back, and manager Nagelsmann confirmed he would stay in that position for the 2026 tournament. Here the coach has made a deliberate choice about how to deploy a talented individual in an unfamiliar role.
In many organisations, the equivalent stretch is reserved as a reward for people who have already proven themselves.
If you want agility across the board, it is important to build unfamiliar experiences into development for everyone. This can be done through short secondments, cross-functional projects, deliberate rotation, a stint owning something outside someone’s specialism.
The goal is regular, low-stakes exposure to the unfamiliar, so that adapting becomes a habit rather than an emergency.
The debrief and the honest conversation are where raw experience is converted into something repeatable
2. Turn experience into learning with reflection
Elite football teams spend almost as long reviewing matches as they play them.
Marcelo Bielsa, currently managing Uruguay, is famously obsessive when it comes to footage. He reportedly had a bed put in his office and can work through up to 100 hours of video per month!
Obviously, I’m not suggesting anything that extreme! However, the debrief and the honest conversation are where raw experience is converted into something repeatable.
L&D can build this rhythm into everyday work through simple, consistent review and feedback practices.
This includes after-action reviews, project retrospectives, brief “what would we do differently” debriefs after any significant piece of work. The discipline of pausing to extract the lesson is what turns a busy career into an agile one.
3. Make it safe to try and to get it wrong
No player will attempt a bold pass if they expect to be hauled off for misplacing it. Nor will they step up for a penalty if a miss will result in them being ejected from the team.
The same is true at work. People are less likely to take risks if the cost of “failure” feels too high.
Building agility depends on shaping a culture where experimentation is expected and early mistakes are treated as useful data rather than failure.
Much of that is set by how managers respond in the moment, which makes managers’ behaviour a central L&D concern, not an afterthought.
4. Rehearse real-life scenarios, not just content
Teams rehearse set pieces and game situations until the response is almost automatic. Purposeful practice which replicates the demands of the game.
Corporate learning, by contrast, often leans heavily on passive content. Agility is far better developed through scenario-based and experiential approaches – simulations, role-plays, live business challenges that force people to apply judgement in conditions that are deliberately unfamiliar.
The closer the practice is to reality, the more naturally the capability transfers when it counts.
5. Build everything on self-awareness
You can’t flex behaviour you can’t see. A good example is the Danish Football Association’s Sealand regional team, which used Insights Discovery Team Effectiveness to strengthen communication, feedback and mutual respect.
The work helped the team understand personal preferences, improve day-to-day collaboration and become more cohesive. This is a reminder that even in football, performance is not just about individual talent. It’s about how well people understand themselves and each other.
The players who adapt best tend to have a clear sense of their own strengths, defaults and blind spots. This is the same for the most agile employees.
Self-awareness sits underneath everything else. Helping people understand their personality preferences and the preferences of others gives them a map of where they are naturally strong and where they will need to stretch. This is the starting point for any genuine behaviour change.
The World Cup will be won by the team that adapts best, not necessarily the one that looks strongest on paper
6. Coach the coaches
A national manager does not develop a squad alone; they rely on a support team to work with players every day. Thomas Tuchel relies on a team of experienced coaches who have worked at top teams including Chelsea, PSG and Bayern Munich.
In organisations, senior leaders rely on talent teams of managers to co-create a culture of learning agility.
They are the people who set the stretch, run the debrief and decide, day to day, whether it is safe to try something new.
If agility is going to become a genuine organisational capability rather than a workshop people attend, L&D’s highest-leverage move is often to equip managers to develop it within their own teams.
The takeaway for L&D
The World Cup will be won by the team that adapts best, not necessarily the one that looks strongest on paper. Work is no different.
The organisations that thrive through constant change will be those whose people can unlearn, relearn and adjust as the context shifts.
The encouraging part is that this is a capability, not a personality type. Capabilities can be built.
The only real question for L&D is whether you are leaving agility to chance or coaching it on purpose?
