Smarter Together: Re-Humanising Learning and Leadership in the Age of AI

Reflections on SMARTER Leadership from ISTD × IFTDO Outreach #10
By Cosiamo (Peter) Baverso, Executive Director, IFTDO

At 5:30 a.m. in a quiet villa overlooking the sea in Southern Italy, I logged into Zoom to join more than 200 trainers, students, and HRD professionals across India and beyond. It was the 10th ISTD × IFTDO Outreach session, a Sunday morning for many, very late night or very early morning for others.

From the very first minutes, it was clear this wasn’t just “another webinar.” It was a shared moment: multiple generations of practitioners gathering to explore a fundamental question:

How do we keep the human at the centre of learning, performance, and leadership in a world where AI seems to do everything for us?

The conversation that followed – guided by the ISTD leadership, Atul Shah, Dr. Patti Phillips (Chair, IFTDO), and many colleagues – revolved around a simple idea:

We are not smart alone. We are smarter together.

That idea is at the heart of a model I shared during the session: the SMARTER Castle™.

Where SMARTER Came From: Marines, Performance, and a Very Human Question

The SMARTER Castle didn’t start as a model. It started as a problem.

For ten years, I worked with the United States Marine Corps as the civilian lead for human performance in an organisation that literally defines itself around performance. In the Marine Corps, the “weapons system” is not a ship or a plane—it’s a human being.

Our team spent two full years on a single question:

“When a Marine needs help doing their job, where do they go—and who do they go to?”

This question sounds simple, but it isn’t. It forced us to look beyond job descriptions and training catalogs and ask:

• Who surrounds this person?

• Who do they trust?

• Who blocks them?

• Who unlocks them?

• How does this web of relationships shape real performance?

From that inquiry emerged what we called the Human Performance Architecture Framework. Over time, as I moved into other contexts—from hospitals to corporate learning to international federations—that framework evolved into the SMARTER Castle™.

Later, living in Matera in Southern Italy, I found myself walking daily past a medieval castle. One day, I stopped and realised:

“This castle looks like my model.”

Towers. Walls. A centre. A foundation. Gateways. People coming in and out.

The metaphor clicked. And so the Human Performance Architecture became the SMARTER Castle™.

Castlello Tramontano in Matera, Italy

SMARTER: A Human Blueprint for Performance and Leadership

SMARTER is an acronym:

Strengths
Meaning
Accountability
Relationships
Trust
Eulogy Virtues
Résumé Virtues

Imagine a castle. In the center tower is your “inner temple”:

• Your Strengths – the natural ways you think, decide, and show up.

• Your Accountability – how you take responsibility for yourself and those around you.

Around that centre are outer towers and spaces that represent:

• Your Relationships –

  • People who come to you (inbound relationships).

  • People you go to for support, challenge, or resources (outbound relationships).

• Your Trust – the conditions that allow you to truly believe another person, and to be believed in return.

• Your Meaning – what matters so much that it becomes non-negotiable in your life and work.

• Your Eulogy – what people will say about you when you’re gone (your legacy).

• Your Résumé – the roles, projects, and achievements you list on paper (your work record).

In traditional HRD and instructional design, we tend to focus almost exclusively on the Résumé tower:

• Tasks

• Competencies

• Learning objectives

• Performance targets

But that’s only one small part of the castle.

If we ignore the rest—strengths, meaning, relationships, trust, and legacy—we risk designing programs that are technically sound but humanly empty.

You can download the .pdf here.

We Are Not Islands: Performance Is Always Relational

One of the core points I shared during the session was this:

No one performs alone.

A Marine doesn’t perform alone. A trainer doesn’t perform alone. An L&D professional doesn’t perform alone.

Every person is embedded in a network of relationships:

• People who come to them for help, advice, decisions, or support.

• People they go to for expertise, challenge, encouragement, or sponsorship.

These relationships:

• Enable or block performance.

• Strengthen or erode mental health.

• Energise or drain motivation.

In the SMARTER Castle, we map these as:

• Inbound Relationships (left side): Who comes to you? Who benefits from your work?

• Outbound Relationships (right side): Who do you go to for challenge, feedback, resources, or clarity?

Cosiamo (Peter) invited participants to reflect:

• How do you feel when people come to you for help?

• Who can you count on to challenge you honestly—rather than just agree with you?

For many, those questions opened a new layer: they realised that their greatest pride often came from moments of contribution and moments of being challenged to grow, not from titles or promotions.

AI, ChatGPT, and the Myth of Being “Smarter” Alone

We cannot talk about learning and leadership today without talking about AI.

I am a heavy user and big fan of tools like ChatGPT. I even joke that I call it “Chad.” Chad will:

• Give me exactly what I ask for.

• Wrap it in flattering, confident language.

• Ask me if I want more.

In other words, AI can easily make us feel smart, productive, and important. But we need to be honest about what it is:

AI is a library of what other people have written and searched for over the last couple of decades. It is not a guardian of truth.

It recites patterns and probabilities, not wisdom. It can:

• Hallucinate references that don’t exist.

• Present invented facts with total confidence.

• Amplify our biases if we’re not careful.

So where does that leave HRD?

• AI can help us draft, summarise, translate, and structure.

• But it cannot replace our responsibility to ask:

  • Is this true?

  • Is this ethical?

  • Is this helpful to real people in real systems?

Most importantly:

AI should never replace our work of helping people find meaning, build trust, and use their strengths in healthy, human ways.

If we let tools “do the doing” for people without helping them understand, contribute, and grow, we may speed things up but hollow them out.

Strengths, Mental Health, and the Need to Contribute

There is also a mental health dimension to all of this. Human beings are wired to contribute. We are designed to:

• Use our strengths.

• Create.

• Build.

• Help.

When our strengths sit unused—when we feel like passengers or tourists in our own lives—we experience:

• Diminished confidence.

• Anxiety.

• A sense that nothing really matters.

During the session, I asked two questions:

1. “What are you most proud of this year?”

2. “How many peak performance moments have you had in the last 12 months?”

For many, the answers were sobering. Their peak moments were real—but rare. Often, those moments shared three features:

• They used their true strengths.

• They involved other people (students, clients, teams, communities).

• They left a lasting emotional imprint – “That was incredible.”

SMARTER leadership asks us to design work, learning, and organisations so that these moments become more frequent, not accidental.

From Tourist to Builder: A Simple Journey of Growth

I also shared a simple progression that often resonates with HRD practitioners:

1. Tourist – Moves through experiences, collects photos, observes but doesn’t deeply engage.

2. Pilgrim – Starts asking questions; seeks meaning and purpose in the journey.

3. Disciple – Believes in something; commits to a path, a practice, or a cause.

4. Builder – Uses strengths and experience to help others grow, heal, and lead.

Most of the people who joined the ISTD × IFTDO outreach are already somewhere between Disciple and Builder:

• You don’t just consume learning; you create it.

• You don’t just follow frameworks; you adapt them to context.

• You don’t just attend sessions; you host, curate, and connect others.

The SMARTER Castle is one way of making that visible: It helps you see where you are, who you serve, and what you want to build next—inside yourself, in your organisation, and in your profession.

Leadership as Human Work, Not Just Hierarchy

In the Q&A, someone asked:

“What style of leadership does your model propose, and where is it most useful?”

For me, the answer is straightforward:

• Leadership is not primarily about hierarchy.

• Leadership is human work.

True leadership is:

Seeing something in someone that they don’t yet see in themselves—and helping them grow into it.

That kind of leadership:

• Works in armies and universities.

• Works in NGOs and corporations.

• Works in classrooms, families, and communities.

The SMARTER Castle gives leaders a map:

• Centre – “Who am I? What are my strengths? What am I accountable for?”

• Left side – “Who comes to me? How do they feel when they do?”

• Right side – “Who do I trust enough to challenge me? Who expands my thinking?”

• Foundation – “What matters so much to me that it’s non-negotiable? What will I leave behind?”

• Top – “What have I actually done, and does it align with who I am and what I care about?”

What This Means for IFTDO, ISTD, and the Future of HRD

So why does any of this matter for global HRD networks like IFTDO and ISTD? Because our members aren’t just looking for content. They are looking for:

• Professional growth

• Community and connection

• A place where their strengths matter

• Evidence that what they do makes a difference

If we want to be relevant in a world of AI, automation, and endless online courses, we must:

1. Design for whole humans, not just roles. Integrate strengths, meaning, and relationships into our programs and certifications.

2. Honour cognitive and character diversity. Tools like Emergenetics®, REDISCOVER U®, and SMARTER can help us unlock people’s unique ways of thinking and contributing.

3. Use technology without surrendering humanity. AI can make us faster. We must make each other truer and wiser.

4. Help practitioners move from Tourist to Builder. From consuming frameworks to co-creating solutions. From attending events to shaping the profession.

5. Anchor in impact and meaning. As Dr. Gautam reminded us during the session: “We are individuals because others exist. To be ourselves, we need others.”

A Simple Invitation

Let me leave you with a few questions to sit with, and perhaps to share with your teams, students, or members:

• Strengths:
  What are you really good at that you’re not using enough in your current work?

• Meaning:
  What matters so much that, if it disappeared from your work, you would feel something important was lost?

• Relationships:
  Who comes to you when they need help?
  Who do you go to when you need help or challenge?

• Trust:
  What would have to be true for you to fully trust a network, a leader, or a learning community?

• Impact (Eulogy Virtues( Legacy: What do you hope people will say about you when they talk about the impact you had on them? This is especially powerful when we lean forward into the work of Drs. Jack and Patti Phillips.

If any of those questions stir something in you, then you’ve already stepped inside the SMARTER Castle. And if we, as a global community of HRD professionals, can help each other live those answers, then we will truly be:

Human together – or not at all.
Smarter together – or not at all.