Action Mapping in practice

Cathy Moore's Action Mapping is one of the few instructional-design frameworks I keep going back to. The framework itself is short — every piece of training is justified only by the on-the-job behaviour it's meant to change — but most of the value is in how you use it in client conversations, not in the diagram.

Two sentences of theory

Every minute of a course exists to train, practise, or assess a specific behaviour the learner is meant to do — or not do — at a specific moment in their work. Anything else in the course is content the learner does not need.

This sounds obvious. Compliance content teams disagree with it five times a day.

The three questions I ask first

I no longer accept a PowerPoint or a 90-minute brief as a starting point. The starting point is three questions to the client's subject lead, asked in this order:

1. Imagine the training worked. What is a person doing six months later that they wouldn't be doing otherwise?

The phrasing matters. "Six months later" prevents the answer "they would have completed the training." "A person doing" forces a behaviour, not a state. The first answer is usually "they would know X." Push back: "and what would they do because they know X?" Eventually a behaviour appears. The act of getting there together turns the subject lead into a co-author rather than a content source.

2. Where in your work do you most often see someone doing this wrong?

This question surfaces concrete cases — real ones, with real names redacted — that become the scenarios in the course. Authentic scenarios beat invented ones in every learner survey I've run.

It also surfaces the subject lead's own pattern recognition. Where they see people getting it wrong is a different question from what learners need to know. The first one is grounded in observation. The second is grounded in theory. The observation is what learners need.

3. If you could only train one decision, what would it be?

The honest answer is usually two or three. That's fine. Two or three decisions is still a constrained scope. The decisions become the spine of the course. Everything else is either a setup for one of the decisions or content that didn't earn its place.

What you have to give up

Action Mapping is unforgiving. To honour the method honestly, you usually have to cut things the client emotionally wants in the module. Three categories come up consistently:

Executive forewords. "The CEO insisted on it being in the module" is a request to spend 4 minutes of learner time on something that isn't training a behaviour. The honest move is to put it on a different channel — an email, an intro at all-hands — and reclaim the 4 minutes.

Clause-by-clause walk-throughs of policy documents. They make the course look comprehensive. They train nothing. The honest replacement is a link to the policy PDF with a counter on the click-through, plus a module that trains the moments the policy actually applies. Click-through rate is usually a much better measure of policy engagement than a pretend recall quiz.

"All employees pass" assessments. If the pass rate is 100%, the assessment isn't measuring the behaviour. The harder version — a final scenario without hints, with a retake mechanism — is the version that produces information you can use. The fail rate is informative, not punitive.

The negotiation, not the method

Action Mapping reads as a method. It's mostly a negotiating posture. You keep asking "what is the on-the-job behaviour?" until the client has to acknowledge that most of the brief is not training the behaviour, then you offer a face-saving alternative for each piece you cut.

The face-saving alternatives matter. You cannot tell a CEO their foreword has been cut from the module. You can tell them you've moved it to a higher-visibility channel and saved the course time for behaviour rehearsal. The first version of that conversation makes you the obstacle. The second makes you the ally.

The hard part isn't cutting content. The hard part is sitting in the conversation where someone whose job depends on having covered everything has to acknowledge that covering everything is not the goal of the training. The work I do as an ID is to make that conversation survivable for the person on the other side of the table.

How I now use the framework

Closing

Most of what makes someone good at instructional design is the technical work — the storyboard, the Storyline build, the SCORM packaging, the QA. That part is the easier half. The harder half is asking, three times running, "but what do we want them to do differently" — and being willing to redesign the course around whatever answer you get.