Why LMS Implementations Fail Before Go-Live: A Pre-Mortem for Learning Leaders

Despite significant investment, many LMS initiatives fail to deliver meaningful performance impact or sustained adoption. These failures are rarely technical. They more often stem from unaddressed concerns about ownership, incentives, stakeholder alignment, and operating realities that leaders sense but do not always surface during selection and implementation.

Using LMS selection as a shared leadership case, this session applies a pre-mortem lens to bring forward the doubts, tensions, and tradeoffs that typically remain unspoken. The focus is not on vendors or features, but on the leadership and stakeholder decisions that determine whether an LMS is adopted in practice, quietly resisted, or slowly deprioritized after launch.

Participants engage in a collaborative case discussion to identify early warning signals related to adoption and stakeholder dynamics, including misaligned expectations between learning, HR, IT, and the business. The session surfaces common failure patterns and the questions leaders wish they had asked earlier, before contracts were signed and success was declared.

After this session, participants will be able to: 

• Identify adoption and stakeholder risks that commonly derail LMS initiatives.
• Use pre-mortems to surface unspoken concerns before major learning technology decisions.
• Recognize governance, ownership, and incentive choices that shape LMS adoption after launch.
• Apply pre-mortem thinking to other high-stakes learning technology and platform decisions.