Thomas Chibatebate

Allow me to open with a deliberate provocation. I have borrowed from Shakespeare’s Macbeth — one of the most canonical texts of the English literary tradition, a tradition that colonialism carried into classrooms across the globe — and rewritten its most famous soliloquy to be about language itself. I chose Shakespeare specifically because of what he represents: the inherited canon that many of us were handed as the standard of educated expression, whether we asked for it or not. The subversion is intentional. “Is this a language which I use before me,The grammar, spellings and sentences toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty Training room from programme to programme To the last syllable of recorded training time… Out, out, brief language… It is a language Used by a Trainer, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing…” Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That is the risk every L&D practitioner runs when they fail to interrogate the language they work in. Wikipedia estimates there are over 7,000 human languages in the world, each one a different lens through which reality is interpreted and understood. In Learning & Development, we tend to collapse all of that into one: whichever colonially dominant language powers the organisation. For many practitioners across Africa and beyond, this means designing and delivering in a borrowed tongue — one that arrived not by choice, but by conquest. We are using a borrowed delivery platform. This is not merely a political observation. It is a practical one. Ngugi wa Thiong’o described how colonialism accomplished its deepest work not through physical force but through “the vast naming system of language”, shaping how people identified themselves and their world. If the language of your training doesn’t connect to the naming and norming structures of your learners, then language becomes a filter for learning, not a gateway to it. The terminology we use inside L&D deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives. We use “trainee,” “participant,” “learner,” and “delegate” interchangeably, but each signals a different relationship between the person holding the knowledge and the person meant to receive it. Are learners active agents in their own development? Or recipients? The word you choose has already answered that question before you’ve opened your mouth. If we are not deliberate about language, we may be reinforcing the very dynamics we claim to be disrupting. Genuine Communities of Practice are built on shared and understood language. When trainers and learners do not share a conceptual vocabulary, when the training speaks past rather than to the people in the room, no volume of good content will close that gap. This is the practical weight behind Dr Chipo Ndudzo’s guiding principle at Providence Human Capital: “We are mindful of the language we use.” Mindfulness here is not a soft skill. It is a core design competency that shapes every session before a single slide is opened. The question worth carrying into your next programme design: What language does your learner think in and is your training designed to meet them there?

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.