Tariro Makina

What does it feel like to walk into a room and immediately sense that it was not designed with you in mind? Maybe the language being used assumes a level of familiarity you do not have. Maybe the examples feel distant from your reality. Maybe everyone else seems to follow the pace with ease and you are quietly working twice as hard just to keep up, while trying not to look like you are struggling. Most people have felt this at some point. And what happens next is telling. Because when people do not feel like they belong in a learning space, they do not disappear. They just stop really participating. It is easy to measure who showed up and who finished. Attendance registers and completion certificates create a tidy paper trail. But they do not tell you whether anyone genuinely engaged, whether the content connected, or whether anything will be applied once people return to their daily work. Completion is just an event. Belonging is a condition. Without the condition, the event means very little. When a learner feels seen, respected, and genuinely included, something shifts. They ask questions they would otherwise have swallowed. They engage with ideas rather than just enduring them. They take risks in discussions because the environment feels safe enough to try and even to get it wrong. It’s at this level of engagement that real learning lives.  Designing for belonging starts long before anyone walks through the door. It starts with honestly asking: Who will be in this room, and what are they bringing with them? One of the ways we try to answer that question at Lubuto is through an exercise we call Kuzivana/Ukwazana, a Shona/Ndebele word meaning getting to know one another. At the start of our learning experiences, participants are invited to introduce themselves and, among other prompts, respond to a question that offers a glimpse into their personal life journey. This doesn’t need to have anything to do with their qualifications or job title. We are looking for something more human than that. What happens in that exercise, every single time, is quietly powerful. Stories surface that no attendance register would ever capture. Someone shares that education was a privilege fought for. Another mentions that they still feel like an outsider in formal learning environments. Someone reveals they are engaging in their second language and appreciates being given the space to say so. This is rooted in one of our core mantras at Lubuto: Every encounter is a sacred encounter. It is a reminder that every person in the room has a story and that story shapes how they show up, how they communicate, and how willing they are to be vulnerable in a room full of strangers. People arrive carrying vastly different backgrounds. Some will have postgraduate degrees. Others may have left formal education early, carrying quiet uncertainty about whether they are “smart enough” to be there. Some are highly confident verbal communicators. Others process deeply but need more time and a different format to express what they know. Language adds another layer, particularly in multilingual contexts where some participants are engaging in their second or third language while others are working in their mother tongue. None of these differences make anyone less capable of learning. But they do mean that a one-size approach to facilitation quietly advantages some people and marginalises others, often without anyone naming it. What Exclusion Actually Costs When people do not feel like they belong, the costs are real, even when they are invisible. The participant who never asks a question is not necessarily disengaged. They may simply not feel safe enough to reveal what they do not know. The one giving short answers in group discussions may be highly capable but has learned that their perspective is not always welcomed. The person who rates the training positively but applies nothing afterwards may have smiled through a session that never spoke to their reality. Beyond the individual, there is an organisational cost. Learning investments that do not reach everyone equally widen existing gaps rather than close them. They unintentionally reinforce who the organisation sees as worth investing in and who is simply expected to adapt and keep up. What Belonging Actually Looks Like Designing for belonging is not about lowering standards. It is about widening access to the same quality of experience. It looks like using examples that reflect the actual diversity of the people in the room. It looks like building in different ways to participate, so the person who thinks best in writing is not always disadvantaged in favour of the person most comfortable speaking aloud. It looks like pacing that allows for processing, not just covering ground. It looks like a facilitator who notices who has not spoken and creates genuine openings, and not performative ones. It also looks like naming, early in the session, that different perspectives are not just tolerated but necessary. That lived experience is a form of expertise. That there is no single “right” background for being in the room. The Shift Worth Making Organisations designing for completion ask: did they attend, and did they finish? Organisations designing for belonging ask something more demanding: did they feel seen? Did they engage fully? Did the experience meet them where they are? The second set of questions is harder to answer. But they are the ones that lead to learning that actually changes something — in people, in teams, and in the cultures we are all trying to build. Belonging is not a soft add-on to good learning design. It is the foundation of it.

Whenever we run a programme at Lubuto, my favourite part is reading the feedback afterwards. This is not because it is always positive. It isn’t. But because it tells a story. A story of how people felt about the entire learning experience. Over time I have come to realise that the feedback itself is only part of the story. How people respond, how much they share, how honest they are willing to be, and what they choose to leave blank, reveals something much bigger. It reflects the kind of culture they operate in every day. And that is worth paying close attention to. What Feedback Really Tells Us There is a difference between evaluation data and cultural data. Evaluation data tells you whether the content was relevant and the facilitator engaging. Cultural data tells you something deeper about trust, and whether people believe their voices actually matter. When feedback is consistently glowing with very little constructive input, it is worth pausing. Overly positive responses across an entire group can reflect a culture where people do not feel safe enough to say what they really think. Vague answers or forms returned almost blank can signal the same thing. Silence in feedback is still a form of communication. How You Collect It Changes What You Get We have explored both QR codes and physical paper forms at Lubuto, and what we discovered was simple but significant: different audiences receive these very differently, shaped by comfort with technology, access to devices, and even levels of trust in digital platforms. Beyond practicality, the method you choose sends an unspoken message. Handing someone a QR code as they walk out of the door signals that feedback is an afterthought. The goal is always to match the collection method to the audience and context, not simply to what is most convenient for the facilitator. The Questions You Ask Determine the Answers You Receive A feedback form built entirely on rating scales will give you numbers. What it rarely gives you is insight. Questions like “What is one thing from today that you are still thinking about?” or “What would have made this experience more useful for you?” create space for honest, specific responses. They also signal to the participant that you are interested in their actual experience, not just a favourable score. Designing good feedback questions deserves the same intentionality as designing the learning experience itself. Timing and the Invitation to Be Honest By the time a session officially closes, people are already mentally elsewhere. Bags are packed, phones are back in hand, and there are a hundred things competing for attention in their minds. In that moment, a detailed feedback form is competing with all of it and the form rarely wins. Being intentional about when feedback is collected and not just that it is collected makes a real difference. Building a brief reflection moment into the session before the close, while people are still present and engaged, produces a different quality of response than a rushed form at the end. The invitation itself to share feedback is equally important. Participants need to feel genuinely free to be honest. This means naming why the feedback matters, acknowledging that critical responses are just as valuable as positive ones, and creating an environment throughout the day where honest contributions are welcomed, not just at the end. A Mirror Worth Looking Into There is a saying that “Feedback is a gift”. And I truly believe it is. But there is a fair amount of work involved in receiving it well and in making sure what you receive is honesty, not just a ticked box. Getting genuine feedback has to be earned through the safety you build in the room, the questions you ask, the method you choose, and the trust you demonstrate by actually doing something with what you hear. At Lubuto, feedback is not the end of the learning experience. It is part of it. Our L&D debriefs depend on it and we use it to improve how we show up at the next session for our learners.  So the next time you distribute those forms, it is worth asking: Have we done the work to deserve honesty? Because the mirror only works if people feel safe enough to look into it. We would love to hear your thoughts on learning feedback, whether you are participating in designing learning experiences or sitting in the room as a learner. How does your organisation approach feedback after training? Do you feel genuinely invited to share honestly, or does it sometimes feel like going through the motions? What has worked, what has surprised you, and what do you wish was done differently? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Training days are exciting for many reasons. For some people, they are a genuine opportunity to widen their knowledge and engage with colleagues on a different level. For others, they become a brief escape from routine, a space to push agendas in discussions or quietly “fire fight” from the back row, or just another chance to simply enjoy what is jokingly referred to as “eating the company’s money.” The room is often full, the conversations are lively, commitments are made, and energy runs high. Yet a week later, once everyone has returned to their workstations and daily pressures have resumed, they find themselves back at default settings. The promised change quietly competes with deadlines, emails, and operational demands and, more often than not, the usual ways of working win. Surely this is not the outcome we intend when we invest in learning initiatives. Why then does it happen? The uncomfortable truth to answer this question is that most organisations treat learning as an event, not a system. You plan for the day. You book the venue. You confirm the catering. You send calendar invites. You prepare slides. Operationally, the event is tight. But learning does not live in the event. Learning exists in the system around it. What happens before people enter that room, and more importantly, what happens after they leave it, determines whether anything truly shifts. Behind every learning experience that “works” is usually a web of invisible work. Conversations with leaders to understand the real business issue, not just the surface request. Clarifying whether the problem is actually a skills gap or something structural. Designing scenarios that mirror real tensions in the workplace. Anticipating resistance. Thinking through how managers will reinforce the behaviours once everyone returns to their desks. This is the part no one sees but this is also the part that protects your investment in learning and development initiatives. Operationally, the reality is that behaviour change outside of most learning experiences competes with daily pressure encountered when one returns to their desk. Deadlines do not pause because people attended a workshop. KPIs do not soften because commitments were made in a circle discussion. Because of this, if learning is not intentionally woven into workflows, team meetings, performance conversations and leadership modelling, the system will always pull people back to their default. Not because they are unwilling. But because systems are stronger than inspiration. Having a learning system in place assumes this tension from the start. It designs for problem solving and reinforcement. It prioritises involving managers and supervisors before the session, not after. It builds in application moments that connect directly to live or real world projects. It creates accountability structures that feel human, not punitive. It recognises that people are not just absorbing content; they are negotiating identity, habit and pressure. All of this requires more than a powerful training day. It requires alignment over an extended period of time. So when we ask a lot of questions before designing a programme for you, or when we propose follow-up sessions, manager toolkits, coaching or reflection checkpoints, it is not to complicate things or keep you in an endless cycles. It is because learning that sticks is engineered — not only to address symptoms, but to solve underlying issues. And the organisations that see real return on their learning spend are not those who run the most workshops. They are the ones who build systems that make change possible long after the food is finished and the slides are closed. Building a learning system is not a one-off effort. It’s a deliberate investment in people, processes, and culture. The organisations that see real impact are the ones that plan beyond the day of training, integrate learning into daily work, and measure success by behaviour and people transformation. Imagine if learning didn’t end when the slides are closed. What could your team achieve if every session became part of a living learning system? We’d love to hear how your organisation ensures learning actually sticks. Share your experiences, questions, or challenges in the comments below.