In this solo talk, Andy Campbell argues that the frustration instructional designers feel with "difficult" subject‑matter experts (SMEs) is often a symptom of a flawed design process rather than a personality problem. He explains that designers typically ask SMEs for learning objectives or a list of content, which forces experts—who are not trained in instructional design—to make decisions they’re not equipped to make. This results in overwhelming information dumps and misaligned courses. Campbell proposes a shift: instead of asking "what should we teach?" designers should ask SMEs about the actual work, focusing on tasks, decision points, common mistakes, edge cases, and memorable stories. These performance‑focused insights reveal the gaps learners need to bridge. He emphasizes that SMEs only need to share their expertise, not understand learning theory, while designers translate those insights into effective instruction. The talk also offers practical advice for handling truly uncooperative SMEs by reframing the conversation around work processes and real‑world examples, turning vague content requests into actionable design problems.
Chapters
I used to think difficult SMEs were just part of the job. You know the ones. You ask them a question and get 17 minutes of information you do not understand. You send them something to review and they rewrite the entire thing. Or you ask, what does somebody actually need to know to do this? And they say, everything. Awesome. That's really helpful. Let me just go make that everything course for you. It should probably only take about 6 months to complete. I've definitely walked away from SME meetings thinking, well, that sucked. But over time, I've started wondering whether we're blaming SMEs for something that might actually be a problem with our process. Because think about this from their side. We bring somebody into a meeting. They usually are an expert at something completely different from learning design. Then we ask, what are the learning objectives? And the SME looks at us like, I don't know, I fix hydraulic pumps. And that's a fair point. Maybe I should be the one figuring out the learning objectives. Or we ask, what content should be in the course? Which sounds like a perfectly reasonable question, except we've basically handed them a giant empty bucket and said, fill this with everything you know. So they do. And then we walk away complaining, holy crap, that SME gave me way too much content. Yeah, well, we asked for it. I've done this too, and I'm not judging anybody from way up high, but it changed the way I started thinking about SME conversations because I don't really want my SME designing the learning experience. I want them helping me understand the work. That's a very different conversation. Instead of asking, What should we teach? I want to know, what does somebody actually have to do? What makes this difficult? Where do people screw this up? What does somebody who's really good at this notice that a beginner doesn't? What decisions are they making? What happens when something goes wrong? Now we're getting somewhere, because that's the stuff I can't easily figure out by myself. The SME has all these patterns in their head. They've seen the weird situations. They know the shortcuts. They know the mistakes. They know that one tiny detail everybody ignores until everything goes sideways. That's the good stuff. The problem is experts don't always realize what's interesting about what they know because to them it's obvious. They've done it a thousand times. So if I say, tell me everything I need to know about this, I shouldn't be shocked when they say, tell me everything they know about it. Again, awesome job, Andy. Now I've got a 97-page PowerPoint deck, 4 PDFs, and an Excel spreadsheet from 2017, and somehow a screenshot nobody can explain. Good luck. So I've become much more deliberate about these conversations. I want examples. I want stories. I want mistakes. I want weird situations. I want to know about the person who did everything technically correct and somehow still screwed it up. Because now we're talking about performance, and you'll probably notice that's the same thing I've been talking about throughout these videos. I'm not starting with what course should we build. I'm starting with what does somebody need to be able to do? The SME helps me understand that world. Then I do the design work, and I think that's an important distinction. Your SME doesn't need to understand instructional design. They don't need to understand cognitive load. They don't need to understand Storyline. They don't— they definitely don't need a 15-minute explanation of whatever learning model your organization is obsessed with this month. They need to understand their expertise. My job is to figure out how to extract the pieces of that expertise somebody else needs in order to perform. And honestly, that's a pretty interesting design problem. Now, sometimes you're still stuck going to that really difficult SME. Some people just suck to work with. I don't have a framework for that. Maybe give them a lot of coffee. But I think we sometimes label somebody a difficult SME When what's really happening is that we haven't given them a useful way to help us. We're asking them to make decisions they shouldn't have to make. We're asking questions they don't know how to answer, or we're asking for the content when what we actually need is insight. So here's something I'd try the next time you're working with a SME. Don't start by asking what needs to go in the training. Actually, Try not talking about the training at all. Ask them about the work. Show me what somebody does. Show me where they get stuck. Tell me about the last time somebody screwed this up. Tell me what you noticed that they don't. Tell me about the weird situation that's really difficult to teach. And then listen, because somewhere inside those stories is probably the thing you actually need to design around. And once you figure that out, now you're designing. You're not taking an information dump and turning it into slides. You're finding the gap between how an expert sees the work and how somebody else sees it, and figuring out how to help them cross it. That's a hell of a lot more interesting than asking, so what content do you want on slide 3? Although If the answer is everything, at least now you know what you're dealing with.
