As instructional designers, we do not necessarily think of ourselves as service professionals, but maybe we should. In the field of education overall, we encourage teachers to move away from seeing themselves as presenters of knowledge and toward being facilitators of learning. In the same way, we must move away from seeing ourselves as experts on learning to see ourselves as facilitators of learning development. It may sound like semantics, but it is a completely different frame of perception.

There is an old saying: If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. As experts in learning, we provide the information directly—we are giving a fish. As facilitators of learning development, we teach others to share expertise more effectively—we teach them to fish.

Learners

As instructional designers, we serve our learners. As we analyze learners’ characteristics and look at data, we may forget there is a human component to what we do: the learner. Learners are not a collection of characteristics, skills, and data points but actual living, breathing individuals (usually a collection of them). How do we serve our learners better?

The first step is to recognize that we serve our learners. We provide opportunities, insight, and a translated version of subject matter expertise. The specifics on the most appropriate way to serve our learners naturally relate to our industry and learners. Still, the frame of reference for providing a service will prevent you from mandating unnecessary resources, eliminating choices, and locking down modules to ensure everyone follows along (unless it’s mandated and outside of your control, of course).

As instructional designers, we serve living people with lives, hopes, dreams, expectations, and limited time available to them. Is your resource worth devoting that precious time to? If the answer is no, then we can do better. There are many options, and while we might be required to adhere to certain requirements, our creativity allows us to create resources that do not waste our learners’ time.

To be frank, learners are not usually the top priority for organizations. They are more worried about organizational performance, adherence to the mission statement, compliance with mandates, etc., which is okay because different frames of reference within an organization allow for the success of the organization. If no one is worried about organizational performance, the mission statement, or mandates, the organization isn’t going to make it very long. As an instructional designer, you should understand these areas and their importance but always advocate for your learners within them.

Organizational performance is important, but unhappy learners forced to endure twenty hours of boring, unrelated training will probably not be motivated to improve organizational performance or support the related mission statement. If we serve our learners, they will be more satisfied with their work, resulting in better performance and support of the organizational mission.

Subject Matter Experts

Subject matter experts are masters of their content. They understand everything about it. However, when you reach that level of expertise, you don’t typically remember what it is like to be a novice learner in your area because your frame of reference has changed. Instructional designers are subject matter experts who translate expertise into a form that novice learners can work with. We provide this service to our subject matter experts.

Working with subject matter experts is one of the biggest challenges for a beginning designer. Why? Because subject matter experts are passionate about their expertise, they want to share every piece and demonstrate what they know. It’s a reasonable reaction to spending 20,000 hours working in an area of knowledge. However, what tends to happen is that the Instructional Designer comes in and says, “Well, our learners don’t need to know this or that. It’s not important”. From a subject matter expert perspective, the response is usually, “What do you mean? Of course it’s important; if it wasn’t important, I wouldn’t have shared it with you”. Instant division!

If we, as Instructional Designers, approach our subject matter experts from a service perspective, we can frame the interaction in a completely different way. We help our subject matter experts frame their perspectives in a way that novice learners can understand. In my experience, that is why most subject matter experts are sharing, they want to provide this knowledge to novice learners. Start with this common ground, ask many questions, and rephrase what the subject matter expert tells you to ensure you understand. After all, instructional designers are not the experts in the content; they are experts in translating it.

We serve our subject matter experts best by employing our expertise in a way that allows their expertise to shine through.

Organizations

In the past, Instructional Designers, as experts in learning, guided the conversation on what may be needed. However, in the current market, everyone, especially upper-level leadership, wants to believe they have the answer. If we approach organizational leaders as experts, we will create an environment of contest rather than collaboration. In contrast, if we approach organizational leadership as a facilitator, we start where the leader is and walk the path with them.

In my experience, organizational leadership almost always knows the problem. Granted, they are human and may not have the root cause exactly correct, but they know what they want. As Instructional Designers, we must start by listening and asking clarifying questions. Whether we are contractors or employees, we provide a service. Our service is to help clarify the problems and find the root causes, enabling the problem to be solved. We can’t fulfill this role if we do not listen.

It should be noted that the industry has moved to a plug-and-play approach, where the Subject Matter Experts and leaders provide documents that the Instructional Designer intends to transfer into a learning experience. This is fine if the objective is to develop materials as quickly as possible, but there is always something lost in translation. I would encourage those in organizational leadership to consider that an hour of their time with a highly accomplished Instructional Designer may save them hours of development and resources in the long term.