The most valuable knowledge in a company is often annoyingly busy. It is answering a client call, fixing a process, noticing the small error before it becomes an expensive one. It lives in people who do not have a spare afternoon to turn experience into a course. John Dunavan has spent much of his career trying to coax that knowledge into motion without embalming it in a slide deck.
His route to that problem was not tidy, which is probably why it became useful. Public records trace a career through multimedia production, business development, senior living, professional services and education technology. The settings changed. The recurring work did not: build enough structure for expertise to travel, then leave enough room for people to question, adapt and apply it.
Today Dunavan is the CEO and founder of Peer-Tree, a small e-learning company based in Franklin, Tennessee. The company offers private, branded learning communities. That description sounds contemporary. The operating idea behind it has been visible in Dunavan's work for years: a learning system should not merely store what an expert knows. It should preserve the conditions in which that knowledge becomes useful.
A curriculum that refused to stay in the classroom
At Brookdale Senior Living, where Dunavan served as Director of Learning, his team built online and on-site training for 2,000 therapists using electronic medical-record tablets. The choice that mattered was almost comically practical. Therapists learned on the same kind of device they used to document their work. Practice resembled performance. The program included instruction, testing and clinician feedback, and it received an ALFA Best of the Best award in 2014.
Another Brookdale program attacked a different kind of delay. “Selling Brookdale” was a 20-hour blended curriculum spread across 90 days. It combined multimedia, independent work and facilitated study around a problem-solving approach to customer needs. Dunavan's account of the program says it reduced a development period that had taken 12 to 18 months to roughly 90 to 120 days. The team received both an ALFA Best of the Best award and a Middle Tennessee ASTD Golden Torch.
The impressive number is not 20 hours. It is the year of waiting that disappeared. The team did not ask learners to consume everything an experienced colleague might know. It organized the decisions that mattered, gave people practice and moved the learning much closer to the work. Instruction became less like a scenic detour and more like a bridge.
“My goal is to help LBMC become a 21st century learning organization.”John Dunavan, on building a company university
The university with no ivy
When Dunavan became Director of Learning and Development at LBMC in 2016, he carried the same instinct into a professional-services firm. The firm needed technical foundations, but it also needed what he called adaptive expertise: critical thinking, complex communication, systems thinking and the ability to use established knowledge in a novel situation. An exam can verify the rule. A client conversation tests whether a person knows what to do when the rule arrives wearing muddy shoes.
The online university he helped build became a home for guides, cheat sheets, presentations, formal courses and external resources. Yet the interesting parts were the ones that behaved less like a conventional library. Interactive timelines turned workflows into graphics, showing how an engagement letter became a tax return or how an audit became a report. Virtual mentorship put experts into conversation with learners who were trying to cross what Dunavan called a sea of information.
A recurring design pattern
There was machinery behind the apparent ease. Dunavan described a formal path from concept through delivery, implementation and re-versioning. A colleague crossed the boundary between marketing and learning, gathering needs from departments. Monthly meetings created a cadence. The system was living, but it was not feral.
This is a useful distinction in a field fond of declaring that learning should be organic. Gardens are organic too, and they still need paths, pruning and someone who remembers which patch was planted. Dunavan's approach paired conversation with maintenance. Knowledge could change because someone had accepted responsibility for keeping it changeable.
Peer-Tree and the social life of expertise
Dunavan left LBMC in 2020 and began leading Peer-Tree. The company describes its purpose in the language of collaboration and encouragement within a community of learning. Its platform gives organizations a branded place for members, content, events and communication. The product belongs to software. The philosophy belongs to all the moments when one person turns to another and says, “Here is how I handled it.”
That makes Peer-Tree less of a career pivot than a compression. Little Planet Learning supplied years in multimedia and technology-based education. Brookdale supplied evidence that realistic practice could change speed and performance. LBMC supplied the living university, task context and virtual mentorship. Peer-Tree gathers those threads into a company whose name is practically a diagram.
A retired astronaut enters the Zoom
A 2023 collaboration offers a revealing picture of Dunavan's preferred kind of learning. Virginia Tech Engineering Online and the university's Instructional Design and Technology graduate program created a remote internship with Peer-Tree and the EPIC Education Foundation. EPIC was represented by Charles Camarda, a retired NASA astronaut. Dunavan served as the principal industry partner.
The doctoral students were not handed a fictional brief with a cheerful invented stakeholder. They helped refine EPIC's challenge-based education program. Their work included analysis, personas, scripting, storyboarding and prototyping. Working in an agile rhythm, teams delivered milestones every two weeks and incorporated expert feedback. The internship was remote; the responsibility was real.
There is a small joke in pairing a Franklin edtech founder with a former astronaut: of course somebody was going to mention launch cycles. More seriously, the collaboration placed learners in the full weather of a project. They had audiences, constraints, specialists and deadlines. The assignment could push back. This is where Dunavan's long interest in context becomes concrete. Authentic work supplies details no worksheet writer is imaginative enough to fake.
Discipline, then a little letting go
Dunavan once summarized the tension inside this work with two requirements: discipline and a little letting go. Discipline makes the resource findable, the workflow visible and the revision scheduled. Letting go allows an expert to admit that the useful answer may begin as a comment, a story or a half-finished explanation. One keeps the system navigable. The other keeps it alive.
His documented awards make the team-centered nature of the work unusually clear. A 2006 nursing education initiative brought together universities and government bodies around emergency-preparedness curriculum. The Brookdale programs were team productions. A 2018 Leading Edge Alliance award recognized leadership development. Even the personal language in his public descriptions returns credit to instructional designers, multimedia developers and colleagues.
This may be the most stealable part of the story. Start with the performance environment. Make the path of work visible. Give people an expert to ask. Build a cadence for revision. Measure whether someone can use the knowledge, not merely locate it. None of those ideas requires a grand platform. Together, though, they explain why a platform like Peer-Tree exists.
They also explain the shape of Dunavan's professional network. His projects repeatedly join people who carry different kinds of authority: clinicians and developers, accountants and marketers, professors and industry partners. He appears most often at the seam between them, translating an ambition into a sequence another person can follow. It is the unglamorous diplomacy of learning design. Everyone agrees that expertise should travel; the difficult conversation begins when somebody asks who will document it, test it and return next month to revise it.
The awards mark outcomes, but the more revealing details are procedural. Six months to produce a substantial curriculum. Two-week milestones for a remote internship. Monthly meetings to keep a company university current. These are clocks, not trophies. They show a preference for momentum that can be observed and corrected. Dunavan's systems do not wait for perfect knowledge. They create a rhythm in which useful knowledge can become less imperfect.
Dunavan's career offers no theatrical conversion scene, no garage mythology and no overnight revelation. It is more cumulative than that. A multimedia producer learns how information is shaped. A learning director watches practice affect performance. A corporate educator sees mentorship escape geography. A founder tries to give all of it a common home. The result is a patient argument that knowledge works best when it remains attached to people.
Companies will keep buying repositories because repositories are easy to count. The harder work is making a place where judgment can travel without pretending to become a rule. Dunavan has spent two decades in that harder territory. His answer is not finished, which suits the subject. A genuine learning community should always leave a branch open for the next useful question.