“We believe deeply that education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail,” says Megan Fanale, chief operations officer of Abilitie.
This belief is a through line in the organization, touching everything from Abilitie’s internal team culture to the services and simulations they provide to the lifelong relationships they aspire to build with their clients.
Abilitie delivers business education through a honed focus on experiential, team-based, AI-driven learning programs for rising and senior leaders. Their programs range from four-hour simulations to their flagship 12-Week MBA. Additionally, at the end of 2024, Abilitie rolled out its new AI Cases, a collection of business case studies that present learners with realistic leadership challenges and place them at the center of the experience, allowing them to practice navigating tough management situations, such as addressing performance issues or delivering difficult feedback, in a risk-free environment.
“We have a deep love of learning and of the ‘a-ha’ moments that happen around learning,” says Luke Owings, Abilitie’s VP of product. “We get really excited by the fact that we can create situations, simulations and experiences that delight learners and help them see something they haven’t seen before, to see more in themselves and take a step forward.”
While the experiential piece is core to everything Abilitie does, Fanale says, the social, community-based aspect of their programs coupled with facilitator instruction are also key.
“We want to be accessible and financially available no matter what organization you’re in, but also with elevated, value-based content with a high value of community.”
One decade, big growth
Abilitie serves organizations of all sizes across a broad range of industries — their leadership programs have touched more than 850 clients and 100,000 learners in more than 50 countries. It’s no small feat for a relatively young organization, which was founded a mere 10 years ago, in 2015.
“Abilitie was born out of Enspire Learning Inc., which had an incredible brand and knowledge base within the edtech and leadership and development world,” says Fanale, who helped found the company with CEO Bjorn Billhardt. “Enspire Learning had a different skill set and focus in the marketplace, which was much more custom e-learning experiences, and so we pivoted Abilitie off of that using some rudimentary technology that we brought over from Enspire and restarted it with a new vision, which was to productize experiential learning.”
At the time and during Abilitie’s first few years, Fanale and Billhardt focused primarily on one- to two-day simulation experiences that were clear, clean, repeatable and scalable. Many of these were conducted in-person for larger companies, and they often were used as a kickoff for a company’s own longer-form leadership program that they were developing themselves or through someone else.
As it was for many, 2020 proved to be a year of big change for Abilitie.
“There was a push toward virtual as 2020 occurred, and we started to have clients ask for more information, material and program solutions around the one-day simulation experience,” says Owings, who joined the leadership team that year. “And so we made the push to start having more programmatic offerings. Those offerings would become extended learning journeys for people at different stages in their career.”
In 2022-23, according to Owings, Abilitie focused heavily on codifying a structure and framework for how its different topic areas, which were moving from simulation to short-term programmatic offerings, could fit together into a broad structure focused on business and leadership. The research and work around this endeavor led to Abilitie identifying the four areas it defines as business education: Business Acumen, Strategic Thinking and Decision-Making, Managing Teams, and Leading with Influence. This culminated in Abilitie’s flagship 12-Week MBA program, where rising leaders learn the value creation, people leadership and decision-making skills needed to succeed as a leader, regardless of industry, function or level. Billhardt and Nathan Kracklauer, Abilitie’s chief research officer, wrote an accompanying book based on the curriculum, “The 12-Week MBA,” which was published in early 2024.
Since then, Owings says, Abilitie has continued to expand with a focus in two primary areas.
“We’ve fleshed out more not just at the rising leader level, but [producing] that same type of experience at the senior leader level,” he says. “We thought, what are the next steps for these learning objectives — business management, team management, influencing and strategic thinking? And how do we produce that at the senior leader level and also have some new types of experiences as part of that?”
Based on this line of thinking, Abilitie has since debuted its Finance Challenge and Executive Challenge programming for senior leaders, as well as its second flagship program, the Senior Leader Program, where executives participate in a series of hands-on challenges covering strategic business acumen, cross-functional leadership and execution skills. The company is also debuting two new programs for senior leaders — Director Challenge and Impact Challenge — later this year.
Abilitie’s second big focus, particularly during the past year, has been on the development and launch of its AI Cases, which are AI-enabled scenarios that let leaders practice real-world business and management challenges, receive instant feedback and refine their decision-making skills.
“We’re out to disrupt business cases,” Fanale says. “What if you could be the protagonist in a business case instead of reading 20 pages and then coming to class to talk about what somebody else did? Why don’t you go try and do it and then talk about what you found easy or hard? And so we started with an initial 24 AI Cases, and our goal is to continue to evolve those.”
Today, Abilitie’s team has grown to about 35 people, and their offerings comprise their two flagship programs (4-12 weeks), accelerator programs (2-3 weeks), intensives (4-8 hours) and AI cases (1-2 hours each). In addition to the emphasis on experiential programming, Fanale stresses the importance of community in Abilitie’s offerings, coupled with facilitator instruction.
“When we say ‘leadership development powered by practice,’ which is Abilitie’s formal tagline, it’s about practicing in social settings,” she says. “It’s not always about the curriculum; it’s about the people you’re surrounded by. And while there’s power in asynchronous learning, it’s not as powerful as when you are guided to deep dive and reflect heavily on what you’re learning about. And who’s better to guide us in that discussion than facilitators?
“I believe deeply that learning comes from the reflection on experience, not experience alone, and how we reflect is through guided discussion,” she continues. “And so, in addition to social learning, community-based learning, we also believe deeply in the power of facilitator instruction to drive that reflection.”
Doing the basics brilliantly
In a mere decade, Abilitie has managed to make a big impact. They’ve built strong trust with their clients, boasting a retention rate over 80 percent. More than 10,000 learners have already participated in the company’s AI Cases, with over 25,000 conversations and counting. And by the end of 2025, Fanale says, they will have AI embedded in every single one of their core simulations.
Fanale is especially proud of one achievement: being named to Training Industry’s Top 20 Training Companies™ list in 2024 and 2025. Getting named to the list has been a goal of the Abilitie team since its inception, but it was one they knew was a stretch, especially since most of the winners are large organizations with a long tenure, and in order to get named to the list, you have to unseat one of the sitting organizations.
“We’re exceptionally proud of this, because it’s not something you can achieve other than just by working your butt off, showing your value and continuing to push forward in an innovative way,” Fanale says. “In 2014, we were basically told it couldn’t be done, and here we sit 10 years later making it happen. And that to us is just a foreshadowing of what’s to come.”
Fanale and Owings credit Abilitie’s success to a number of factors. One is, as Fanale puts it: doing the basics brilliantly.
“A lot of times it doesn’t require the newest and latest technology to be effective,” she says. “But we believe in doing the basics brilliantly, and doing it in a way that’s engaging and utilizes the latest tech to make it even better. And that’s what we’re trying to bring together … that perfect equation of success for our learners.”
The pace at which Abilitie innovates, as well as having experiential learning at the core of all of its offerings, also sets the organization apart, Fanale says.
“If you just have fun but you don’t know what you’ve learned, then we’ve failed,” she says. “So as we innovate and as we drive experiential learning, it’s really about what adds value, not about what makes something cool or different. That’s really, really important to us.”
From Owings’ perspective, Abilitie has a unique set of three attributes that truly set it apart in the L&D space.
“At our core, I think we have a strong perspective on what great learning looks like,” he says. “We design interesting simulations and interesting worlds. We design learning that’s immersive and social and practice-oriented and builds up from a really good understanding of adult learning and of what will resonate with people.”
The second piece, Owings notes, is Abilitie’s faculty network. This is critical, he says, because learning — especially at adult stages — is inherently social and requires somebody to help you work through it and apply it to you. Abilitie’s network of skilled facilitators meets this need.
Finally, Owings notes, Abilitie excels in client service, which starts with a deep understanding of each client.
“I think you see companies with some of these,” Owings says. “You see consulting firms with good client service, but not scalable solutions. You see product companies with amazing scalable solutions, but no client understanding and no understanding of how to bring it the last foot with faculty. So I think what we have — the faculty, the instructional design and the client service — is a pretty cool combination.”
Of course, to borrow the words of Mary Kay Ash, a company is only as good as the people it keeps. And Abilitie’s team culture is a big part of what makes the organization special.
Described by Fanale as “wildly collaborative, almost to a fault,” the Abilitie team is tenacious, thrives on a challenge and is eager to support one another. “Collaboration is both a strength and a weakness, and we’re learning as we grow where the healthy line is. But any day of the week, I’d rather work on a team that’s eager to support one another rather than throwing their hands in the air. I’m really proud of how we come together as an ensemble when it counts to truly make it sing, especially for our clients.”
As a fully remote organization, Abilitie emphasizes personal responsibility among its team.
“I think how that manifests is we hire people who are really good at their jobs and are self-driven and able to decide how and where to spend their time,” Owings says. “What that looks like is an internal work culture that has a lot of independence and autonomy for individuals who are driving and taking ownership of their own piece and then at targeted times coming together and saying, ‘how do we take this forward?’”
Corporate training that doesn’t suck
As Abilitie moves past its 10-year mark, leadership has plans and goals for what’s to come.
“We’re out to touch as many leaders as we can,” Fanale says. “We’re really renewing our focus on a wild goal and how many leaders we can impact in the next five years.”
With big ambitions in mind, Abilitie is steadily working to bring AI into all of its offerings in order to elevate the learning experience.
“The big thing that’s happening in all learning organizations, if they’re smart, is that we’re exploring and discovering what’s possible with AI,” Owings says. “I think we’ve only scratched the surface of how it actually can be used as an enabler of learning. A lot of our future goals and strategic initiatives are around being in this state of discovery right now and discovering what works and how to integrate it into a coherent portfolio.”
As far as what that will look like in practice, Owings foresees examining Abilitie’s existing portfolio, with its focus on its four primary subject areas and two levels, and identifying where there are weaknesses, where the learning could get better and where it could be enabled, particularly by AI.
“I think that’s what our exploration is for the next year: Filling out our portfolio, figuring out what’s new and possible, and then taking it forward,” Owings says.
And, as Fanale points out, they want both their team and their clients to have fun while doing it.
“If we could have a slightly crude tagline, it would be ‘Corporate Training That Doesn’t Suck,’” she says. “We want people to have fun. Life is too short. Instead of feeling like leadership and development training is compliance training, what if we could go in and not only show what we’re capable of, but also identify where our opportunities are? We can do that in these experiential situations where you’re learning in a social environment.”
Abilitie is a corporate member of BetterWork Media Group, the parent company of Chief Talent Officer. Learn more about Abilitie by accessing BetterWork Media Group’s Corporate Member Directory.
