The bumpy journey finally came to an end as the plane touched the ground. It was raining, the air was cold, and my nose had practically gone numb. But as always, I believe every experience carries a lesson – iif you pause long enough to notice it.
This time, the learning came from something unexpected.
I was travelling back from Bangalore when I witnessed a rather unusual situation during boarding. As passengers were settling into their seats, I heard this exchange unfold:
“Hi, that’s my seat – 14B,” one passenger said.
“Sorry, I think you’re mistaken. 14B is mine. Here’s my boarding pass,” the other replied.
At first, it seemed like a simple mix-up. But when the cabin crew checked both boarding passes, the reality was startling.
Both passengers were right.
They had both been assigned the exact same seat.
The cabin crew handled it calmly: “Sir, one of you can take a front seat that’s available. Apologies for the inconvenience.”
Situation resolved. But a question lingered with me: what if there had been no spare seat? What then?
The Realisation: One Solution Cannot Work for Everyone
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That small incident stayed with me for the rest of the flight. The parallel it drew to our work in learning and development was immediate and powerful.
Two passengers. One seat number. Same apparent need – yet entirely different contexts, expectations, and experiences.
This is exactly what happens when organisations apply a single, standardised training programme across diverse employee groups. On the surface, the need looks the same: develop communication skills, build leadership capability, improve team dynamics. But the context of a first-time manager in a Tier 2 city is vastly different from that of a senior leader at a global consulting firm. Treating them identically is the corporate equivalent of double-booking seat 14B.
Before you can cater to the different passengers in the room, you have to start by effectively identifying their true growth areas.
What Deep Learner Understanding Actually Looks Like
The book How to Get to Know Your Customer makes a deceptively simple argument: successful businesses are built on deep customer understanding, not assumptions. The same principle applies to learning design.
It is not enough to know what your learner needs. You need to understand:
- Their motivations and readiness to learn
- The organisational context they operate in
- The specific pain points and performance gaps they face
- How they prefer to engage with content—in a classroom, virtually, through stories, or through doing
- What ‘success’ looks like for their manager, their team, and their organisation
And critically—these things evolve. A learning intervention that worked brilliantly for a cohort of new managers three years ago may not land the same way today. Continuous listening is not a luxury; it is a design requirement.
How FocusU Builds This Understanding into Every Engagement
At FocusU, this belief is not a tagline—it is the foundation of how we design every learning intervention. Our design philosophy starts with a single, non-negotiable conviction: one size never fits all.
Before a single slide is built or a single activity is designed, our team invests time in understanding three things:
1. Who is this for?
Every learning cohort is unique. A team of mid-level managers at a pharmaceutical company has different needs, vocabulary, pressures, and aspirations than a group of new joiners at a retail organisation. Our discovery process surfaces these nuances—through stakeholder conversations, pre-programme diagnostics, and, where possible, direct conversations with participants.
2. What level of impact are our stakeholders seeking?
Not every learning need calls for a two-day residential workshop. Sometimes a well-crafted microlearning journey achieves more sustained behaviour change than a full-day session. We deliberately choose from a varied toolkit – instructor-led training, virtual sessions, gamified experiences, Lego® Serious Play®, case-based learning, and more – based on what the context demands, not what is easiest to deliver.
3. What needs to be customised?
Even our flagship programmes – like Everything DiSC®, The Leadership Challenge, and The Five Behaviors – are deployed with customisation. Industry-specific scenarios, relevant case studies, language that reflects the client’s culture: these are not add-ons. They are what transforms a good programme into a meaningful one.
The Cost of Getting This Wrong
Going back to the flight: imagine if the airline had no flexibility, no awareness of the individual situation, and no ability to adapt. Two passengers, one seat, no resolution. A simple administrative error would have become a deeply frustrating, trust-damaging experience.
The same dynamic plays out in organisations every day. When learning programmes are designed without genuine understanding of the learner:
- Participants disengage, viewing training as a box-ticking exercise
- Behaviour change does not follow the session into the workplace
- L&D leaders struggle to demonstrate ROI to business stakeholders
- Trust in the learning function erodes over time
Over 15 years and more than 800 client partnerships, we have seen first-hand that the most impactful learning interventions share one common trait: they were designed for a specific group of people, in a specific context, with a specific outcome in mind.
Practical Steps for L&D Professionals: Moving Beyond Assumptions
If you are designing or commissioning a learning programme, here are five questions worth asking before you finalise the approach:
- Have we spoken to participants, not just their managers? Stakeholder briefs tell you the desired outcome. Conversations with learners tell you the real starting point.
- Do we understand the ‘day in the life’ of this cohort? Context shapes what will and will not transfer from a learning session into daily behaviour. Remember that your learners are stepping back into busy inboxes and tight deadlines, which is exactly why less is more when it comes to pre- and post-work.
- Is the methodology matched to the audience? A highly analytical cohort may respond better to case-based learning; a frontline team may need immersive, activity-driven experiences.
- Have we defined what ‘success’ looks like in behavioural terms? Vague outcomes produce vague results.
- How will we know if the learning has translated into the workplace? Post-programme reinforcement and measurement are not afterthoughts—they are part of the design. Understanding your learner is only the first step; to ensure long-term behavior change, you must also understand the power of reinforcement in workplace learning.
Final Thought: Pause Before You Prescribe
The next time you are tempted to roll out the same workshop you ran last year, or to deploy a programme that worked well for another business unit, pause and ask: do I really understand the context of this particular group of learners?
Because just like seat 14B, what looks like the same problem on the surface may need a completely different solution underneath.
At FocusU, we have spent more than a decade asking the right questions before we design a single learning experience. If you are looking for a partner who will take the time to understand your people before prescribing a solution, we would love to connect.
