Harrison Hartley – Instructional Designer

Sometimes Subject Matter Experts and Stakeholders are our worst enemies. I know, I know, they’re the keepers of knowledge and the ones who are calling the shots on this project. They want results and they want the assessment metrics to prove it. But sometimes we can be weeks or months into a project when the thought slowly creeps into our heads – “I don’t think these people actually have an idea of what they want”. Anyone who has worked with clients in any vaguely creative field will be familiar with their customers saying “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it”. There in lies the problem with designing. How can we know what the client wants when they don’t have the slightest idea of an end product?

I recall a friend of mine who went away to a Guitar Workshop Retreat (think of guitar lessons combined with summer camp for adults) and communal chores were part of the process. My friend ended up on vacuuming duty for the common rooms. The vacuum snagged a piece of fringe on a carpet and jammed itself up. My friend careful disassembled the vacuum, took his screwdriver to the beater bar assembly… and promptly had 27 different screws, springs and washers jump up into his face and roll around the floor. Suddenly the vacuum was in worse shape than it was 5 minutes ago and there were still multiple rooms that needed to be vacuumed. My friend calmly thought to himself “Wait a minute, I have the tools and knowledge to fix this. Stay calm, we can do this.” 

I’ve had moments in my own experience where SMEs and Stakeholders have come to me with small mountains of physical handouts, spiral bound pages and even post-it notes written two Presidential administrations ago with two immediate tasks. “Digitize this” and then the inevitable “Train people using these”. Once I start to ask discovery questions I quickly realize no one has given any thought to the “Who/What/Where/How/Why?” of the training program, and really just want people to have a PDF containing their completion certificate containing the name of the to-be-build program. Here is where I repeat a mantra to myself “Stay calm, we can do this”

Design in eLearning can be such a double-edged sword. Employing flashing graphics, eye-catching multimedia design and interactivity in every step of the content will absolutely help captivate your audience and keep them engage, even if it’s the novelty of “What will happen when I click on something next?” But I’ve also been on the other side of the conversation where a stakeholder is gradually adding how something should look rather than addressing the point of “What do we want the person to learn?” Sometimes you need to be the one grabbing the wheel to right the course, albeit in small ways.

I tend to like working from a Backwards perspective of the learning objective, and then asking if there are any specific events, interactions or real-world situations that they want to include. Usually it tends to have an anecdote be remembered of “Oh, right, Person X did this because we didn’t inform them of the protocol” or something similar. You may need to do a little bit of digging, have some patience for potential ramblings and put clues together to understand what they really are looking for.

Remember, building and designing the content is only half the battle. For now we are still interacting with humans with all their focus and faults. You are your own personal Subject Matter Expert and you’re bringing your expertise and tools of the trade to the table. Don’t expect to take the first idea of what’s been shared and have that be your permanent blueprint.