I like to think of it as a “choose your own mystery” type of situation. It has been successful as an assessment in that you can set up a scenario in Engage and build a different path for each answer…often there can be more than one right answer, so it’s a great way to look at the consequences without real world repercussions.

The point of organizing your branches carefully is important. If you start organizing in the beginning, it will be a much simplier and less daunting task when it comes time to connect everything together in the end.

This type of branching also works when you are speaking to a broad audience. The general topic may apply to everyone, but the individual tasks may apply to only a group of people. Articulate allows for branching to connect people to information that only applies to them.

Certainly an important topic to discuss as ID’s try to make training more engaging and meaningful to the learner.

Why does the scenario need to be rewritten? Has it been used in training and found to have no effect? That could be a sign that the training isn’t focused on a strong goal.

Or is the scenario just considered “boring” by someone on the team, and you’re supposed to “liven it up?” (I get this a lot.)

Either way, it’s completely acceptable and reasonable for you as an ID to ask for more direct contact with the client or stakeholders. Once you have that contact, you can ask questions like those in the Flash scenario.

Politically, it helps if you can phrase your questions as, “I need some more information to make sure the scenario really reflects what would happen on the job, since it’s not a job that I do myself.” If the scenario includes lots of dialog, an additional angle is to say, “I want to make sure I realistically capture how people who do this job talk among themselves, so I need to talk with someone in the job or, ideally, shadow them a bit while they work.”

Both of these approaches are completely reasonable requests that will only improve the scenario. Basically, you’re asking for more direct access to the people affected by the training, so you can find the stronger goal for yourself. Politically, you may need to leave the original goal intact, but you can write the scenario in such a way that it supports the stronger business goal that you’ve uncovered.

Some questions that have worked for me:

- Who has requested this training? Can I talk directly to them? (You could phrase this as, “I could write a more compelling scenario if I could talk directly to the person who has requested it, so I can capture the terminology people in that area use and the perspective they have.”)

- Have there been incidents that inspired this training? What happened? (This gives you creative fodder for the scenario, which you’ll probably have to heavily disguise, and helps you see the business reasons for the training.)

- Can I sit in on a meeting or otherwise shadow people affected by the training? (This is most likely to work if you phrase it as a need to hear how they talk and interact, so you can write realistic dialog and create believable characters.)

- How does this scenario fit into the rest of the materials? (If they’re asking you to rewrite just part of the training content, you can say that you need to be familiar with the whole package to make sure the scenario supports it. Sometimes the larger context can help you identify what the underlying business goal is likely to be.)

If for some (unreasonable!) reason you’re denied access to the people who have requested the training and aren’t allowed to talk to the people who will use it, you could do a little research on your own to see what the business goal could be, based on news about the client and about the issue addressed in the training.

You could quickly search for business news about the client and their competitors, and search for the issue in general terms (like “change management pharmaceutical industry”). I do this kind of research for every new client and most courses.

This is a distressingly common problem. Too often, instructional design is seen as just information design, and IDs are expected to just fix up content that someone else has decided must be presented. To change this, we need to gently but persistently show our clients that we’re performance consultants, not just information presenters, and to do that we need to ask lots of questions.