Driving Business Results through Instructional Design

So you got to drive the business results. You got to have measurable outcomes and you got to use high quality instructional design. So one of the things that I’ve seen far too often is because instructional design is sort of this…It’s a science but most of us have never been exposed to it. Right? Most of us have gone our whole lives and what the heck is an instructional designer. Do they design instructions? Like they’re the guys that make the IKEA thing? Whatever. Like what is that? There’s an art and science to instructional design. These are people that study adult learning and they understand how to decompose content to the molecular level to give it out to  people in the right cadence, in the right format to get the outcome.

Because I think and you mentioned this earlier. The frustration that a lot of content people have is ‘people read my books and they send me amazing emails of how I’ve changed their life. They come up to me after the speech and they cry. I know this stuff works. Okay. But then I get in front of a camera and bla bla bla bla bla and I put it on the screen, and I either can’t sell it or it doesn’t do anything.’ Right? Well, if you’re skipping this part, you know, it’s sort of like skipping the blueprinting part of building a house. I wouldn’t want to live in a house that I sort of scribbled on a piece of paper than an engineer didn’t validate. You know. The roofs not gonna come in on me when I’m sleeping. And it’s the same thing with instructional design.

Again, in the consumer world you can kind of get away with whatever you want. You know. If you want to tell them the sky is purple and they believe the sky is purple. Good luck. There are a whole suite of people in the corporate world making these investments whose job is to defy, you know, their job is to say no. Their job is when the boss comes in with your book under their shoulders and ‘I just read this book. I want to do this everywhere.’ to go oh shit! How do I say no to that? Right? They’ll say no to that by asking a few simple questions. What’s your learning methodology? What’s the instructional design? What are the capabilities you’re developing. Uh…uh. Okay, thanks. You know. Most people skip it cuz they don’t know it. And it’s costly to skip. You can get away with it early on but eventually you will hit a wall and you will hit a ceiling.