Working with subject-matter experts

The first SME I ever worked with sent me a 47-slide PowerPoint and said "just turn this into a course."

I tried. The result was technically faithful — every fact preserved, every example honoured, every slide accounted for. It was also unwatchable. The pass rate on the assessment was low and the SME's read was "the learners aren't paying attention." My read, eventually, was that I'd asked the wrong question on day one.

This is the writeup of what I ask now instead.

The questions I ask on the first call

I no longer ask "what should the course cover." Three other questions, in order:

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

This is Action Mapping by a different name. The phrasing forces a behaviour rather than a state. The first answer is almost always a knowledge claim. Push gently until a behaviour appears.

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

The most valuable single question in SME interviewing. It surfaces three things at once: concrete examples for scenarios, the SME's own pattern recognition (different from their theory), and their emotional investment in the topic. Watch their face when they answer; the places they visibly care about are the places the course should focus.

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

Forces the SME to pick a narrow scope. The honest answer is usually two or three. That's fine. The decisions become the spine. Everything else has to justify its place.

Patterns I now expect

SMEs over-estimate what learners already know. Most of them can't un-know the things they know. They write the course as if the audience shared their baseline. Learners hit a slide on day one that assumes context they don't have, lose the thread, and never recover.

The fix is to test the course on a real first-year employee before it ships. Not a focus group — one person, in their desk, with their actual onboarding context. Five minutes of watching them confused is worth a week of SME re-review.

SMEs over-value content they had to look up. If the SME just spent two hours researching a niche edge case, they will want to include it. The fact that it was hard to find for them feels, in their head, like an argument for it being in the course. The fact that it took two hours for an expert to find usually means it's far outside the typical learner's needs.

A thing is course-worthy not because the SME finds it interesting but because the learner will actually encounter it. Things the learner encounters once a year are job aids, not course content. The course teaches what they encounter every week. The job aid covers what they encounter occasionally.

SMEs under-estimate the value of being wrong. Most SMEs design assessments around getting the right answer. The more useful design is around making a wrong choice and seeing what happens. A branching scenario where the learner picks the obvious wrong choice and receives a realistic consequence — quiet manager feedback, a damaged relationship, a missed compliance opportunity — is the single most memorable interaction a course can contain.

The SME's first reaction is usually "but we don't want to teach them the wrong way." The reframe: we're not teaching them the wrong way, we're teaching them what the wrong way feels like, so they recognise it the next time they're tempted by it.

When the SME pushes back on every scenario

The common case: a senior expert who rejects scenario drafts as "too obvious" or "too unrealistic." After a few rounds of this, the move that has worked for me is to stop generating scenarios and ask the SME for one of theirs:

"Tell me about a single time in your career when someone got this badly wrong in a way that surprised you."

The story they tell usually becomes the spine of the module. Variations on it become the rest of the scenarios. Their own example, used as the seed, defuses the "too unrealistic" objection — because the scenario is, by definition, something they personally watched a real practitioner do.

Stop inventing scenarios. Mine theirs.

What I no longer do

• Accept a deck as a starting point. The deck is reference material; the conversation is the starting point.
• Try to be neutral. SMEs respond better to instructional designers who are visibly interested in the topic than to ones who appear professionally detached.
• Design the assessment last. Draft the final scenario first; design the course to build to it.

Closing

Two things make SME collaboration go well. First, treat them as the co-author whose name should go on the credit, not the content source whose role is to deliver bullet points. Second, ask the questions that surface their pattern recognition — not the questions that produce a coverage list. The pattern recognition is what makes good training. The coverage list is what makes long training.

I have made every mistake on this list at least once.