For years, many of us in training and development have believed that better qualifications, better programmes, and bigger budgets would solve organisational problems. What if that belief itself is part of the problem?
This reflection is an invitation — especially to those of us working in learning and development — to pause and examine the assumptions we rarely question about how learning actually works in complex, uncertain environments.
It’s written for practitioners who are brave enough to admit that some of our most familiar approaches may no longer serve the realities we face.
Like many professionals in this field, we took pride in our qualifications — earned from respected institutions and reflected neatly on our CVs. We genuinely believed that well-designed training programmes were the answer to most organisational challenges. Whether the issue was performance, productivity, or behaviour, training was often the default response.
Yet many of the same problems kept resurfacing — even after repeated rounds of training.
Year after year, we submitted new training budgets, hoping the next programme would finally fix what the last one hadn’t. The content changed, the facilitators changed, sometimes even the methodology changed — but the outcomes often remained stubbornly familiar.
This forced a deeper reckoning.
As Dr Father Anselm Adodo warns in his writings on subtle distractive and destructive elements embedded in this type of adopted convention and heritage, we often apply “mop and bucket solutions” to deeply systemic problems. In education, governance, health, and organisational life, we rush to provide answers without first being clear about the questions we are trying to solve.
This forced me to confront an uncomfortable possibility: had I been doing the same?
Had we been delivering learning without fully understanding the context, the lived realities of participants, or the systems they were expected to return to after the training room? Had we mistaken cleverness for intelligence, know-how for understanding, and technical competence for wisdom?
Too often, learning becomes fragmented — high on know-how but low on know-why. Knowledge is transferred, but meaning is not built. Skills are taught, but judgement is underdeveloped. Content is delivered, but context is missing.
And when knowledge is divorced from local realities, culture, and lived experience, it struggles to take root.
This is where the shift from conventional training to more integral approaches to learning becomes essential. Integral learning asks different questions. It pays attention not only to skills and information, but to people, systems, relationships, values, and purpose. It recognises that performance does not improve in isolation — it improves when individuals understand how their role fits into a wider human and organisational story.
…we don’t need alternatives to conventional Training and Development: we need rather an alternative thinking of alternatives.
– Boeventura de Souza Santos
So the real question becomes this: if traditional training is not producing deeper intelligence, relevance, or local meaning — what must learning become instead?
Perhaps the future of learning and development lies not in offering more solutions, but in cultivating better questions. Not in repeating what has worked before, but in designing learning that is responsive, contextual, and deeply human.
For those of us entrusted with developing people in a VUCA (Vulnerable, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world, that may be the most important work of all.