We Don’t Train Humans. We Facilitate Learning.

Adults are not taught the way children are taught. Learning is facilitated.”— Malcolm Knowles (paraphrased)

“People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”— Peter Senge

The word training made me cringe the day I realised why. I trained my dog!

I taught him to sit, to stay, to respond to commands. I rewarded what I wanted. I corrected what I didn’t. It worked — because that is how training works.

And then, without warning, a question landed in me:

When adults are “trained”, what are we assuming they are?

That question didn’t arrive as an argument. It arrived as a feeling. Because humans do not arrive empty. They are not tabula rasa.

Every adult I have ever worked with arrived carrying something — experience, intuition, failure, competence, resistance, humour, fatigue, insight. Even when they said nothing, their knowing was already there; and yet, so much learning is designed as if none of this exists.

Top-down. Pre-packaged.Delivered.

As an L&D Facilitator, I never worked that way. Yes, organisations expected me to arrive with content — and I did. But I never started there.

I started with people. I asked questions. I listened. I watched what lit them up and what shut them down. Then I adjusted.

Sometimes that meant changing the flow completely. Sometimes, it meant adding an activity on the spot to bring the room back to life. Sometimes, it meant throwing the plan away and drawing from a quiet internal reservoir — ideas, metaphors, movement, play — built over years of doing this work.

Learning, I discovered, does not respond to control. It responds to invitation. Even online, this mattered. When adults were spoken at, they disengaged politely. When they were invited in, something shifted. The energy returned; curiosity surfaced; fun appeared — not as entertainment, but as relief.

One moment stays with me.

In Australia, I facilitated a two-day business planning workshop. I didn’t begin with models or theory. I asked participants to imagine their business as they wanted it to be. Not as it was but as they hoped. They worked in groups with giant sheets of paper, whiteboards, and a mess of stationery. They drew, argued, erased, rebuilt. They made decisions with their hands as much as their heads. Only later did we talk about theory, and suddenly it all made sense. At the end, someone said, almost surprised:

“We knew this in practice. But understanding why it works has changed how confident we feel using it.”

That moment mattered; because I hadn’t trained anyone; I hadn’t filled anyone up.I had simply made space.

More recently, something similar happened in my classroom — and it made me smile.

I was teaching a session on international talent development. The textbook, as expected, used the phrase training and development. I didn’t stop the class or make a big point of it. I just said, almost in passing, that there’s a view in adult learning that we facilitate learning for humans — and that training is what we do with dogs and animals — so when we use this terminology, it’s worth being aware of what it implies. Then we carried on, or so I thought.

What surprised me was what followed.

Throughout the session, my students began correcting themselves — and me. They started saying L&D instead of training. They spoke about facilitation rather than delivery. At one point, when I casually used the word training because it was on the slide, a student laughed and said,“L&D — you said we train dogs and animals, not humans!” 😂

It wasn’t confrontational. It wasn’t heavy. It was playful, alert, alive; it told me everything.

They hadn’t memorised a concept. They had shifted how they saw themselves. A small change in language had changed where authority sat — not above them, but with them.

This is what Malcolm Knowles understood. Adults don’t need to be shaped from above. They need room to connect, to test, to make meaning. This is also what Peter Senge named so simply: people don’t resist change — they resist being changed.

I personally don’t believe in training humans.

I believe in learning and development that begins with what is already there.

I believe in facilitation that trusts people to think.

I believe in letting learning grow rather than forcing it into shape.

Humans are not animals to be trained. They are already someone.

Learning is not something we do to them. It is something we make possible!!!