Awards are strange things.
You tell yourself they do not matter. Then you spend an evening watching names disappear from a screen, one by one, while pretending you are completely relaxed about the outcome.
This time, our name was still there at the end. Twice.
Freeformers was named Learning Provider of the Year at the British Training Awards. We also won L&D Team of the Year alongside the brilliant team at Wickes.
Of course, we are proud. We are also competitive enough to admit that winning feels good.
But the trophies are not the most important part. What matters is what the judges chose to recognise: a different way for L&D to create value.
Not by producing more learning. By helping organisations understand people better, design the right response and build the capability to keep doing it without us.
The problem with being good at fulfilling briefs
Much of the learning industry is built around a straightforward transaction.
A client asks for an e-learning module, workshop or programme. A provider responds with the most creative, polished or innovative version of that thing. Everyone works hard. The brief gets delivered.
But somewhere in that process, one important question can go missing:
Is this actually the right thing to build?
We know that problem because we have lived it. Earlier in our careers, both of us were often asked to do the right work inside systems that made it difficult to design the right answer.
You can improve the production process, make the content more engaging and add better technology, but still end up solving the wrong problem beautifully.
That is why Freeformers approaches L&D as part of the wider employee experience, not as a content factory sitting at the edge of it.
Learning should not simply respond to orders from the business. It should help the business understand what people are experiencing, what is getting in their way and what needs to change.
Treating employee experience as a product
Our winning submission was titled Making employee experience a product.
That does not mean turning employees into customers or reducing work to a series of transactions. It means bringing the discipline of great product and customer experience design into the way organisations design for their people.
We use human-centred design, particularly the Double Diamond, because L&D does not need another proprietary model for the sake of having one.
If a proven, openly available design process is good enough for products and customer experiences, why would we pretend workplace learning is too special to use it?
The process begins with discovery: observing behaviour, asking better questions and resisting the temptation to leap from a request to a solution.
That sounds sensible. Inside a busy organisation, it is much harder than it sounds.
Teams are already delivering. Stakeholders are waiting. Existing systems reward output and speed. People carry assumptions built from years inside the same business.
Even when an L&D team wants to work differently, finding the time and permission to change its operating rhythm can feel impossible.
Our job is to make the shift practical enough to happen within the work, not as another initiative layered on top of it.
Why we took the Wickes L&D team to a zoo
The Wickes team was receiving a familiar stream of requests: build this e-learning; create this resource; deliver this thing.
Simply telling stakeholders that e-learning is not always the answer would not have changed the system. The team needed the confidence, evidence and practical tools to interrogate requests and recommend something better.
So we started at Whipsnade Zoo.
Yes, really.
We asked seven L&D professionals to investigate how a zookeeper actually works. Instead of asking how old the elephants were, they explored working patterns, communication, collaboration, food preparation and the realities of the environment.
The unfamiliar setting mattered.
Inside your own organisation, experience can quietly harden into assumption. At the zoo, the team had no choice but to be curious. They had to observe, listen and build an evidence-based picture of somebody else’s working life.
They then applied the same habits in a Wickes store. In one exercise, each person held three five-minute conversations with colleagues. They returned with immediate insights that changed how they thought about live projects.
It was not months of heavyweight research. It was enough high-quality discovery, at the right moment, to challenge what the team thought it knew.
That distinction matters. Research should be rigorous, but rigour should not become an excuse for leaving curiosity to specialists.
Giving L&D teams practical research capability helps them make better everyday decisions — especially when the alternative is designing from assumption.
AI should strengthen the process, not replace it
The next step was to help Wickes turn individual discoveries into shared organisational intelligence.
Using technology already available in its Google ecosystem, including Gemini and NotebookLM, the team could begin building a common bank of insight.
Seven people working on separate projects no longer had to start every brief from zero. They could explore what the team already knew, identify gaps and decide where more discovery was needed.
This is where we believe AI creates real value for L&D.
Not as a machine that turns a prompt into generic content. Not as an expensive new platform searching for a problem. And not as a substitute for human judgement.
AI can make human-centred design faster and more scalable. It can help teams synthesise conversations, spot themes and keep discovery alive as an operating rhythm rather than a one-off stage at the beginning of a major project.
But the human stays in the loop.
Context, ethics, interpretation and challenge still matter. Put something in, get something out and use it is not a responsible design process. It is a shortcut to work that looks plausible and sounds like everyone else’s.
We are deliberately tool-agnostic. Most organisations already have access to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini or Claude. These tools behave differently, but each can be made useful when people understand both the process and the technology.
We would rather help a client build that fluency than sell them another costly AI product that could be overtaken by a feature release tomorrow.
The best providers should make clients less dependent on them
The Wickes project is the part of these awards that makes us proudest.
We did not take the brief away, disappear and return with a shiny answer. We helped the team develop a way of working it could use, adapt and improve inside the business.
That is a less transactional model of consulting and learning provision. It may not create dependency, but it creates something more valuable: capability.
There will always be moments when an organisation needs external expertise or additional production capacity. But a provider should not confuse being needed forever with having created lasting value.
The real test is whether the work lives in the business after the provider leaves.
A moment worth marking
Freeformers moves quickly.
A finished project leads to the next idea. A successful proposal creates more work. A breakthrough becomes the new baseline. Emilie and I are not naturally brilliant at stopping to acknowledge what we have built.
These awards forced us to pause.
They recognised the trust of clients willing to try something different, including Wickes, Galt and Crystal Care Collection.
They recognised a team prepared to visit a zoo, ask unusually detailed questions of a zookeeper and bring that curiosity back into the business.
And they recognised an approach we have spent several years trying to define, test and prove.
Perhaps that is the real value of an award. It creates an artefact from a moment that would otherwise disappear into whatever comes next.
We have now done this work ourselves, for clients and with clients. We know the approach works. We also know it will keep evolving.
So yes, the trophies look good on the shelf. But the bigger win is this: L&D does not have to be the department that makes what it is asked to make.
It can be the engine that helps an organisation understand its people, challenge its assumptions and design better work.
That is an achievement worth celebrating — and a future worth building.