Listening first: notes from the field

Listening is not a discovery phase box to tick. It is how design becomes accountable to the people who will use it.

Before Canela builds a curriculum, we look for the hidden expertise already inside teams: the workarounds, the language people trust, the points of friction.

Every organisation has an official story — the version of practice that gets described in policy documents, induction guides and training briefs. And then there is what people actually do. The gap between the two is where the most useful learning design lives.

Listening well means finding that gap. Not to expose it as a failure, but to understand it as information. When frontline workers have developed workarounds, those workarounds usually exist for good reasons — the official method didn't account for the real conditions. Good listening surfaces those reasons and uses them to design something better.

The tools matter less than the orientation. Whether you use interviews, observation, focus groups or informal conversation, the question underneath is always the same: what do people already know that we are not building on? What are they carrying that the training never acknowledges? Where does the official script break down — and what do people do when it does?

Listening also means being honest about what you will do with what you hear. Co-design requires consent. People should know whether their words will be quoted, summarised, anonymised or used to shape a design they will later see. When that transparency is absent, listening becomes extraction. When it is present, it becomes a foundation for learning that people actually trust.

The learning that gets used is almost always the learning that was designed with people rather than for them. That begins here — before the first slide is built, before the module is scoped, before anyone has decided what the training is about.