There’s one really important question I believe we, as learning designers, facilitators, and coaches, need to be asking ourselves:
What's your start place?
It’s a deceptively simple question, and one that a colleague asked me on a few occasions when I was scoping some learning a few years back. At first, I didn’t quite grasp what she asking. But over time, I realised: she was inviting me to examine the unseen forces shaping how I design learning.
Let’s pause for a moment and imagine that learning design is a little bit like preparing a meal. We often focus on the ingredients: content, tools, methodologies. We refine our recipes with instructional models and delivery strategies. But what if the most important ingredient isn’t in the recipe?
What if it’s the chef - not just their skills, but their entire lived experience—their memories, their cultural background, their worldview, their deepest beliefs about nourishment, what makes a great meal.
That’s getting at the true start place.
What’s your start place in learning design? It’s the question that starts to unpack ‘The Unseen Architect’ of learning design – The learning designer: It’s about understanding how “who we are, shapes Learning Design"
That’s our start place.
The Unseen Architect
As a learning designer, facilitator and coach in Aotearoa New Zealand, I've come to understand that our start place in learning design is not a methodology, or a process to start and then finish.
It’s actually more of a journey of self-discovery about why we tick like we do, why we think like we do and why we act like we do? It's about recognising and placing importance on the fact that before we design a single learning experience, we must first understand the hidden architect behind the learning design: ourselves – Ko wai au? Who am I?
Three Lenses That Shape Our Start Place
Let’s explore three critical, and often invisible, lenses that shape our worldview and what we do. Are there more than three? Probably but these are three that are top of mind for me at the moment.
1. Cultural Heritage: The Ecosystem of Understanding
Our cultural background is not just our ethnicity or where we’re from—it’s a deep, complex ecosystem shaped over generations and by many experiences. It’s formed by those who have gone before us, those around us, it’s moulded by our own moment of existence and left for those who comes after us.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, this means deeply engaging with two worldviews. A western worldview and a Te Ao Māori—the Māori worldview. It’s about straddling the space between a lived experience and a learned experience. For me it's a learned experience. I'm Tangata Tiriti (Pākehā).
When considering learning from a te ao Māori worldview we learn that learning was never about individual achievement, but about collective growth, connection to ancestors, and understanding one's place and connection in a broader ecological and social system.
So a couple of questions to consider:
How does your cultural context influence your design decisions?
Whose worldview do you prioritise when designing learning experiences?
2. Values and Beliefs: The Invisible Architecture
We don’t just use models—we are the model. Our values and beliefs silently shape how we interact, interpret, and design.
They influence our decisions, behaviours, and goals, creating a framework for how we navigate life's challenges and opportunities. Our values and beliefs are not separate from our design; they ARE the design.
Have you ever stopped to consider how your values and beliefs play out in what you do?
3. Personal Narrative: The Hidden Curriculum of Our Lives
Every scar, every moment of joy, every struggle becomes a lens through which we design learning.
Have you ever considered how your experiences of learning—perhaps of feeling excluded, or of profound connection, the failure sometimes associated with learning—shape the learning experiences you create?
My own journey navigating both lived and learned worlds has taught me that learning is never neutral. It's always relational and it is full of bias both conscious and unconscious.
And our biases? These are not just individual quirks, but systemic in built patterns of behaviour. We must courageously ask:
Whose knowledge are we privileging?
Whose voices are being valued? Whose experiences are being rendered invisible?
Am I aware of my own biases and how these play out in my learning design?
Reclaiming the Start Place
I believe the most transformative learning design doesn’t begin with tools, frameworks, or methodologies. It requires us to look beyond technical skills and into the deeply human, often uncomfortable territory of ‘Who we are’.
Learning design isn't just about creating content; it's about understanding the profound responsibility we have in shaping how people learn, grow, and make meaning. If the challenge lies in moving from transactional learning to more transformational learning. It requires courage on our part to examine our own biases, our own worldviews, our own unconscious assumptions, values and beliefs about who we are.
As the Māori proverb reminds us:
“Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi.”
With your basket and my basket, the people will thrive.
Our start place in learning design is not what we know, the methodology we find most useful, but our willingness to continually unlearn, to be surprised, to make space for wisdom that exists as we explore our true start place in learning design.
Let’s begin by asking:
Ko wai au? Who am I?
What is my start place in learning design?
NB: This blog is a slightly adapted version of a five minute talk given at the Offbeat Sparks Special Online Edition in December 2024 where 21 LnD professionals were asked - what is one question LnD should ask of themselves in 2025. You can watch the recording of my talk here or by checking it out on my media page.
