Sweating The Details

Blog post by Clark Quinn - July 2025

It’s easy to follow the general precepts of design. You know: get assigned a course, talk to the SME, develop and deliver a course with content and a quiz, and move on. Largely, this seems like the way things progress, particularly for the ‘accidental instructional designer’ (was this really what you intended to do as a kid?). Yet, this path is doomed to failure. Why? Because it’s missing the nuances; you have to be sweating the details. Here’s what I mean.

A Historical Artifact

It’s a scourge of our industry that we do too little in design. There are a host of reasons, probably all are complicit. For one, face-to-face training has been tainted by people’s experience in education (”if it looks like school, it must be right”). So, the training was bad. Also, digital learning was initially complex enough that people applied teams. When tools came out that made it easy to take PDFs and PPTs and put them online with a quiz, we started downhill.

The pressure to take face-to-face (F2F) training and put it online got a boost from 9/11. No one wanted to travel, so elearning was the go. Same for Covid. And continuing pressure for faster and cheaper wouldn’t make that any better. Thus, we faced increasing pressures to take content and put it onto screens, whether via PowerPoint or an authoring tool.

What we are repeatedly told is, of course, “telling ain’t training”. So why do we continue to see ‘information dump’? The above is largely the reason, but we also have to acknowledge that our audience isn’t supposed to understand learning. That’s our job. And we haven’t been effective enough at communicating what we need. Maybe we care too much, and thus aren’t able to withstand the pressures for expediency? Regardless, we’re not acknowledging what we know is needed.

The Realities of Learning

Learning to do new things, what our role is (or should be) in the organization, isn’t a result of just information. What’s needed is meaningful learning. As Paul Kirschner has said in our conference, learning is about a persistent change in long-term memory. For me, that’s only detectable in people’s responses, so I’m more aligned with the notion that learning, at least what we need, is a persistent change in our response to a familiar stimulus. Very behavioral, yes, but it aligns with what we need: we want to see people responding in new ways to situations where they either were responding in other ways, or didn’t know how to respond at all.

At the core, what we’re doing is creating persistent new patterns in our cognitive architecture. We’re linking old patterns in new ways. We need to strengthen the patterns over time, but the strengthening mechanism itself needs time to rest before it can do more. And we need to fine-tune what we’re doing, from initially coarse understandings until we develop the nuanced ability that is needed in the workplace.

It’s like exercise: you don’t go to the gym and become buff from one visit. Instead, you need to return again and again over time. Moreover, you need to be doing the right thing for where you’re currently at. Including varying what you’re doing, so maybe strength training alternating with aerobic activity. The long-term path to acquiring healthy muscles really shares a lot with developing new skills. (In fact, of course, there’s overlap.) The takeaway is that we need to provide good initial guidance, practice, feedback, and then ascertain when we’ve sufficiently acquired capability. We’ll also need to keep up the practice, unless there’re sufficient practice opportunities in the real world and ways to get feedback.

Going Deeper

The first thing you’re liable to do is be given a course description. Which is wrong to start? Who has validated that this course is needed? Who has ensured that the course is on target? What’s the core problem? Is a course the best solution? And so on. There’s a whole field called performance consulting that’s all about answering these questions, and the real thing to be doing first is an analysis. You should come out with very clear performance objectives stating what people need to be doing that they aren’t capable of doing now. And more, of course. In short, there’s a lot that goes into doing this right.

The same holds true as we go further. For design, there is so much to consider. Just for practice, we’re looking at story, and challenge, and core decisions, and context, and… Then there’re things that go across practice, such as spacing, and context (differently), and challenge again. Which isn’t even to talk of ‘content’ (which rightly is models and examples), nor the ‘emotional’ aspects.

In short, there’s a lot more that goes into good learning design than following a ‘paint by numbers’ approach. And I’m not even getting into testing and tuning; yikes! To be clear, my goal isn’t to scare you or put you off. The details are manageable, but they do need to be addressed. The simple matter is that you’ll automate the right way to do things, with some practice. Initially, it will take longer, but then doing things such as designing meaningful practice will become natural (you’ll wonder why you did it any other way!).

Why, then? The simple reason is that if it matters, you need to attend to the nuances. If it doesn’t matter, why bother? However, typically our organizations have legitimate needs for new skills. That’s our job, to make that happen. Yet we can’t do it simplistically, or we simply won’t achieve the outcomes. If we’re not sweating the details, our learners aren’t acquiring the needed skills. It’s really that simple.

Which is why, by the way, we’re creating the Nuances series of presentations. There’s more, of course (it’s like fractals, every time you go into detail, there’s more complexity to be found). But what we are trying to do is take you to the necessary level of understanding. From there, it’s up to you to put it into practice. We’re here, however, for feedback. Use our discussion forums and ask questions. Someone will help; if no one else, we’re there. We’re here to help you do the job you want to do. Now, go forth and make good learning!

References

Bean, C. (2023). The Accidental Instructional Designer: Learning Design for the Digital Age. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Niles-Hoffman, L. (2025). Eight Levers of EdTech Transformation. Boston: LDA Press.

Quinn, C. N. (2021). Learning Science for Instructional Designers: From Cognition to Application. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Quinn, C. N. (2022). Make It Meaningful: Taking Learning Design from Instructional to Transformational. Boston: LDA Press.

Wallace, G.W. (2023). The L&D Pivot Point: Performance Improvement Consulting - Pivot From Instructional Development Efforts to Non-Instructional Development Efforts or to do Both. Boston: LDA Press.