Instructional design isn't optional if you want learning to stick. Without it, you're building a house without blueprints. Corporate gatekeepers will reject projects that skip the design phase, and digital content fails when you ignore adult learning theory and molecular-level content breakdown.
So you've got to drive the business results. You've got to have measurable outcomes. And you've 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. Most of us have gone our whole lives and said, what the heck is an instructional designer? Do they design instructions like the guys that make the IKEA thing? Whatever. 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 I go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 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, 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 that an engineer didn't validate the roof's not going to 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. 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, their job is to say no. Their job is when the boss comes in with your book under their shoulder and says, ah, I just want this book, I want to do this everywhere, to go, oh shit, how do I say no to that? 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, uh, okay, thanks. Most people skip it because 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.
