5 Whys to Improve Your Instructional Design Practice

Here’s a fairly common situation for instructional designers—a training request pops up, seemingly out of nowhere, because a problem has been identified. The nature of the “problem” could be technical or interpersonal, process-based or performance-based. And by jumping immediately to a solution—in this case, training—we miss the opportunity to identify the root cause and solve the real problem at hand. This missed opportunity also wastes our finite resources of time and money and risks a loss of credibility when the training solution does not produce expected results for the organization.