CoverStory
By Anthony Ewing
Life sciences learning leaders are living in a paradox. On one hand, learning has never been more necessary and more visible. Organizations are navigating rapid portfolio evolution, the acceleration of digital and artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and constant shifts in customer engagement models. Skills matter. Capability matters. Adaptability matters.
And yet, many learning leaders quietly feel more exposed than ever.
Budgets are scrutinized. Headcounts are questioned. Priorities shift mid-quarter. And despite years of progress, learning and development (L&D) continues to find itself explaining not just what it’s doing but why it matters.
That tension — “more needed, yet more vulnerable” — is where many life sciences L&D leaders sit today.
Two leaders inside the LTEN community chose to meet that tension head-on.
Amity Cutaia, head of global therapeutic area, product & in-market training at Astellas, and Kristy Callahan, head of learning & development at GE HealthCare, are both longstanding leaders within the LTEN network and members of the LTEN Board of Directors.
Cutaia and Callahan made a deliberate decision to step out of constant execution mode. They invested time, energy and organizational trust into building a long-term learning strategy — one that would become the lifeblood of their teams, a rallying cry for stakeholders and a driver of outcomes they hadn’t previously thought possible.
Both leaders sought not only to articulate a learning strategy, but to design one that could be lived and experienced. With the support of their external industry partner, Thoughtium, a strategic blueprint process allowed them to do just that.
Through process, both leaders aligned their teams around the core building blocks of a long-term strategy: mission, vision, long-term goals and ways of working. (Figure 1) Those elements came together in a single “strategy on a page” that helped their teams prioritize, communicate and execute with confidence.
What emerged wasn’t a deck. It was direction.
In fast-moving organizations, learning teams don’t struggle because they lack effort. They struggle because the pace of demand leaves little room to pause, ask better questions and choose the right response. That’s where a clear learning strategy becomes more than a plan — it unlocks critical thinking. It gives learning leaders the clarity and confidence to slow down just enough to think, align and act with intention.
With a strategy in place, learning leaders stop defaulting to execution and start leading with judgment. They can ask sharper questions:
What problem are we solving?
What outcome matters most?
Who needs to be aligned before we move?
Those moments of pause are what turn learning from a reactive service into a strategic function.
Cutaia put it plainly: “We are no longer in the space where training is simply an assumption.” In other words, credibility is no longer automatic — it has to be earned through clarity, alignment and measurable outcomes.
Callahan echoed a similar shift: “We had to move from being order takers to being strategic business partners who speak the language of the business.”
That move requires critical thinking — knowing when to challenge, when to clarify and how to connect learning work to what the organization is truly driving.
Without a clear, lived strategy, teams stay busy. The strategic blueprint created the direction that makes critical thinking possible and makes learning leadership sustainable.
What made both Callahan’s and Cutaia’s work different wasn’t that they created a strategy. It’s that they built one their teams could carry, repeat and use.
They approached strategy the way strong commercial teams approach a product launch: with discipline, focus and intentional design.
Several choices made that possible.
They made it simple enough to remember. Both leaders were challenged to distill their vision into no more than five words and their mission into no more than 10. This wasn’t about clever phrasing. It was about usability. If a strategy can’t be remembered, it can’t guide decisions. In Cutaia’s organization, that clarity became “Leading the Learning.” In Callahan’s, it became “Driving Curiosity.” Short enough to remember, but strong enough to guide decisions for years.
They made it co-owned, not top-down. The strategy wasn’t developed in isolation. Team involvement created energy, ownership and pride, turning the strategy into something people felt part of, not subject to. According to Cutaia, “You get buy-in because you co-author with the team.”
They made it visible… constantly. Rather than a one-time rollout, the strategy showed up repeatedly: in team conversations, stakeholder discussions, prioritization decisions and leadership updates. Repetition turned intention into habit.
They used it as a decision filter. Perhaps most importantly, the strategy became a tool for saying “not right now” or assessing whether a request required priority at this moment. As Callahan reflected, “We finally had a shared language to ask: Which of these priorities should we pause?”
That question only works when a strategy is clear enough to defend.
At one point, Cutaia described the strategy as finally giving her team something they had long been missing: a shared picture of what they were actually building, so that every contribution made sense in context.
The real test of strategy isn’t how it sounds, it’s what it changes.
In both organizations, the team’s co-owned, articulated strategy quickly produced noticeable shifts.
The team’s identity became unmistakable. Mission and vision stopped being internal statements and became external signals. Stakeholders could clearly articulate what the learning team stood for and what problems it existed to solve.As Cutaia noted, “Our identity became incredibly clear, not just to us, but to the organization.”Over time, those vision statements became shorthand across the business — “Leading the Learning” and “Driving Curiosity” weren’t just phrases, they were signals of what each team stood for.
Learning earned protection, not just praise. When budgets tighten, clarity matters. A wellarticulated strategy doesn’t just win applause, it protects the work that truly drives value. When times became uncertain in their organizations, Cutaia and Callahan continuously relied on their learning strategy to reground key stakeholders in the value brought by their teams.
The conversation with leadership changed. Rather than reacting to requests, both leaders found themselves presenting forward-looking capability strategies. They began discussing where the organization needed to be, not just what it needed next.Callahan knew the shift had taken hold when she started hearing a subtle but powerful change in language: “We heard people say, ‘With Kristy’s team…’ That’s when we knew we had a seat at the table.” That’s not branding. That’s trust.
Learning leaders operate at multiple altitudes every day. On one level, there’s tactical execution: content, delivery and logistics. On another, operational planning: roadmaps, resources and coordination.
But the altitude that often gets crowded out is the strategic one. This is where one asks, what is the role that L&D plays in the broader organization’s strategy? (Figure 2)
Cutaia reflected on this challenge that comes with ignoring the strategic altitude altogether: “You may be thinking that everything is fine, that you’re a true partner, but there may be conversations in other rooms where folks are questioning your value. All of a sudden you’ll have less headcount, budget and won’t be at the table.”
Strategy pulls learning leaders into that higher-altitude conversation. Without it, teams stay busy at ground level while decisions are being made above them and at times without them.
Callahan captured the urgency succinctly: “We are at risk of becoming irrelevant, while at the same time we are on the precipice of the greatest transformation of our careers.”
Both things can be true. Strategy determines which one wins.
For learning leaders reflecting on their own path forward, Callahan’s and Cutaia’s experiences point to a few essential considerations.
Their approach to co-authoring strategy did not result in a prescription but more so a mentality easily adopted by others.
Clarity beats comprehensiveness. A strategy doesn’t need to say everything. It needs to say the right things clearly enough to guide decisions. For Cutaia’s team, that clarity showed up in a simple mission: Designing and delivering great learning experiences. It made the team’s purpose easy to remember, repeat and act on.
If it doesn’t shape behavior, it’s not strategy. Your strategy is only as good as your day-to-day actions. It should influence how work is prioritized, how trade-offs are made and how the team responds in real time. That’s why Callahan and Cutaia both paired their strategy with practical ways of working like “consult before you commit,” so that alignment happens before momentum turns into misdirection.
Strategy is culture work. A resonant strategy doesn’t just align effort; it builds connection, energy and belonging. When it’s truly lived, it becomes a mechanism for recognition. Both leaders created formal acknowledgements and awards tied to their vision, helping the strategy take root in everyday culture. (Figure 3)
L&D in life sciences is at a defining moment.
You may feel more needed than ever and more exposed than ever — at the same time.
The leaders who will shape the next chapter aren’t the ones deploying the most training to the most individuals. They’re the ones who decide, intentionally, what matters most and make that direction unmistakable.
Cutaia and Callahan didn’t just create strategies. They created belief: in their teams, in their value and in the future of learning as a true driver of commercial success.
That’s the work now.
Anthony Ewing is co-founder and chief brand officer for Thoughtium. Email him at anthony@thoughtium.com or connect through www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyewing.
