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Working with Subject Matter Experts

Changes after review (2026-10-08). An independent review of the first build (docs/review-fable.md) led to these changes in the shipped course, which this document does not repeat: the module now ends with a thank-you, one Monday move and an honest ask for Module 2 by email, instead of a "Next: Module 2" note; the overview describes Modules 0 and 2 to 7 and the job aids as planned, not present; the Lesson 3 sort became ten single-answer stake calls with a one-line reason each (the library's sort rejects a wrong bin on the spot, so it could not carry the "control with reputation underneath" item honestly); the scenario's "take the deck and run" choice leads to a second scene before any ending, the correct option is no longer the longest, and each ending's debrief refers only to the route taken; the pharma and compliance stories, the "doing this a while" note and the composite note are open prose; the three Lesson 3 callouts are one paragraph; the diagrams were redrawn with fewer words so nothing renders under 12px on a phone, and they embed Lato; the symptoms-and-causes diagram is a table; the AI disclosure is first person. Eleven sentences flagged as generated-sounding were rewritten with the same facts. The full list, with evidence, is in docs/changes-after-review.md. This document keeps the editor's British spelling; the course uses American spelling.

Editor's handoff to the instructional designer. Four parts: the course intro, the landing page copy, Module 1 cut to a 35-45 minute teaser, and design notes. All prose is learner-facing unless marked [editor note]. Chunks are labelled [chunk: name] and carry a (suggested block: ...) where one is obvious. The ID picks the final blocks.

Sources are under /Users/appa/ASSETS/Human Side ID/course-build/ unless a full path is given. Every number, name and claim is listed with its source in Part 4.

Part 1. Course intro (learner-facing)

[chunk: what this course is] (suggested block: statement for the first paragraph, then plain text)

Every course you'll ever build starts inside someone else's head. Getting the knowledge out of that head and into a course, without losing the knowledge and without losing the person, is the real work of instructional design.

This course is about the expert: the engineer, the surgeon, the professor who knows everything your course needs to say and has ninety minutes a week to give you. No ADDIE lecture, no learning theory, no tool training. It assumes you can build a course.

[chunk: who it's for]

If you're about to face your first subject matter expert, this is the course I wish someone had handed me at the start. If you've worked with fifty, you'll recognise every situation here, and I'd bet at least two modules change how you run your next project.

Exercises run on your own project. If you don't have one with an expert in it, you get the Meridian case: a fictional medical device company and an expert named Ray, who has eighteen years in the field and one very specific grudge about training.

[chunk: the eight modules] (suggested block: process or timeline, one step per module)

• Module 0, Orientation. How the course works, a self-assessment, and picking your project.
• Module 1, Think Like Your SME. Why experts behave the way they do, and what helping you costs them. Free.
• Module 2, The Kickoff. The meeting that prevents most of what goes wrong later, and the one-page brief.
• Module 3, Extraction. Getting knowledge out of a busy expert in 30 minutes, and getting them to prioritise.
• Module 4, Translation. Expert material into learning material that survives the expert's accuracy review.
• Module 5, Review Cycles. Feedback in both directions, including telling a senior expert their content needs rework.
• Module 6, When It Goes Sideways. Six difficult-SME patterns, what each means, and what to do first.
• Module 7, Capstone. One complete SME relationship on the Meridian project, then your personal playbook.

[chunk: what you keep]

You keep fourteen job aids (kickoff brief, question bank, review template, email pack, field guide), seven branching practice scenarios, and a personal SME playbook you assemble in the capstone.

[chunk: about Dean]

I'm Dean Ahlgren. I've been an instructional designer for 25 years, built more than 200 courses, and worked with more than 200 subject matter experts, most of them at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. The rest were in pharmaceutical compliance, heavy machinery safety at Bechtel, and a tech startup. Different industries, same job underneath.

Part 2. Marketing page copy (portfolio.deanahlgren.com)

[editor note] Reader: an instructional designer deciding in 30 seconds whether to try the free module. Keep the page to one screen above the fold: headline, subhead, problem paragraph, call to action. The rest sits below.

Headline

Your expert just sent you a 212-page manual and said "just use my slides."

Subhead

A free 40-minute module on reading what your subject matter expert actually needs, from an instructional designer who has worked with more than 200 of them.

The problem (suggested block: quote, in the reader's voice)

You asked for a kickoff meeting. What you got was an email: "Not sure what we'd cover for an hour. The procedures are all documented. Can you work from the manual and my slide deck?" Attached: a 212-page service manual and 74 slides, half of them photos with no captions. The deadline hasn't moved. Everyone says this person is the one who knows the equipment, and everyone also says he hates training. You have eight weeks and no idea what to send back.

What the free module gives you

• The four things an expert has at stake when they help you (time, reputation, control, history) and a rough decoder for reading deflection, nitpicking, hostility and silence as signals.
• A worked read of Ray's email, the fictional expert above, showing what the deflection says and which reply has a chance.
• The three jobs you actually hold in the relationship, and the three postures that fail, starting with the one that feels most respectful.
• A branching scenario where you answer a reluctant expert's "just build it from my deck" and see where each reply leads.
• A story from my own work: the sculpture course that two experts nearly sank, and what one phone call across three time zones fixed.

What the full course adds (coming)

• Module 2, The Kickoff: the 25-minute agenda and the one-page brief that prevent most of what goes wrong later.
• Module 3, Extraction: getting usable content out of a busy expert in 30 minutes, and getting them to prioritise when "it's all critical."
• Module 4, Translation: simplifying expert material without breaking the accuracy they spent a career building.
• Module 5, Review Cycles: structured review requests, and how to tell a senior expert their content needs rework.
• Module 6, When It Goes Sideways: six difficult-SME patterns, their signals, the first moves, and when to escalate.
• Module 7, Capstone: run the whole cycle on the Meridian project, then assemble your personal playbook.

Modules 2 through 7 are in production. The free module stands on its own.

Call to action (suggested block: a single button)

Start Module 1, free, no sign-up.

Honesty line (suggested block: callout, note)

The Meridian case and Ray Ostrowski are fictional. Dean's own stories are told as they happened. This course was drafted with AI from Dean's source material and reviewed by Dean.

[editor note] No testimonials, learner counts or prices anywhere on the page. The subhead's "40-minute" matches the teaser's 40-minute total; change it if the lesson times change.

Part 3. Module 1 teaser: Think Like Your SME

Total time: about 40 minutes across four lessons. Module objective: Read an expert's behaviour (deflection, over-supply, silence) as information about what helping you costs them, and choose your next move accordingly.

[chunk: module opener] (suggested block: statement)

Most SME problems are not personality problems. They are predictable consequences of what collaboration costs an expert. Learn to read those costs, and half the difficult-SME stories in this course stop happening to you.

Lesson 1. The Course That Two Experts Nearly Sank

Time: 5 minutes Objective: Recognise that content problems usually have human causes.

[chunk: Dean's story, part one] (suggested block: video if Dean records it; otherwise media-text with a simple three-pin map, Barcelona, New York, Hawaii)

A few years into building online courses at the Academy of Art University, I got a project that looked straightforward on paper. One sculpture course. Two instructors sharing it, both talented, both credentialed. One was in Barcelona. The other was in New York. I was coordinating from Hawaii.

The content came in late. Very late, and very rough. One instructor sent notes so overloaded with theory that I couldn't find the actual course in them. The other sent almost nothing, and what he sent was hard to follow. His English was shaky and the material read like it had been assembled in a hurry.

I did what my training told me to do. I dove in. I organised, I built slides, I added interactions. Technically, everything I made was fine. Then the pilot reviews came back, and they were not fine. Students and faculty both said the course felt disjointed and confusing.

[chunk: Dean's story, part two]

So I paused production and did the thing I should have done first. I got both instructors on one call, across three time zones, and I asked questions instead of presenting solutions. What do you want students to walk away with? How do you picture them working at home?

Here is what came out. The instructor who buried me in theory was worried that students wouldn't have proper sculpture tools in their apartments, so she padded the course with theory to compensate. The instructor who sent almost nothing was embarrassed about his written English, so he wrote as little as possible. And he'd been juggling a film festival the entire time, which is why everything arrived late. They had never even met each other.

None of that was in the content. All of it was in the people.

[chunk: Dean's story, the fix]

We fixed the course in a fraction of the time it took to build it wrong. A supplies kit solved the tools problem, and the theory padding came out. I sat with the second instructor one on one, he explained concepts out loud, and I wrote them down. The final course flowed, the pilot group liked it, and both instructors ended up proud of it.

[chunk: landing line] (suggested block: takeaway callout)

The content problems were people problems. In twenty-five years, they almost always have been. That is what this module is about: learning to see your expert clearly before you touch their content.

(suggested block: continue gate before Lesson 2)

Lesson 2. The Curse of Knowledge

Time: 8 minutes Objective: Diagnose thin or bloated SME content as compression rather than as a verdict on the expert.

[chunk: expertise compresses]

Here is the first thing to understand about experts: the better someone is at something, the worse they usually are at explaining it to a beginner. This is not a flaw in your SME. It is a property of expertise itself.

When someone does a task for fifteen years, the steps compress. What used to be forty conscious decisions becomes one smooth motion. Ask a veteran technician how she diagnoses a fault and she'll say something like "you can just tell." She is not being difficult. The knowledge is real, but it stopped being visible to her a decade ago.

Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, you can't fully imagine not knowing it. For our work it means something specific: the expert is the person least able to see what a beginner needs, and the most qualified to verify it. You need them for accuracy. You can't rely on them for sequence, emphasis or level. That split is the whole job.

[chunk: two symptoms, one disease] (suggested block: compare or tabs, "Over-explainer" and "Under-explainer")

The over-explainer sends you everything. Forty pages, sixty slides, every exception and edge case, because from inside the expertise it is all connected and it is all important. Cutting any of it feels, to them, like lying to the learners.

The under-explainer sends you three bullet points for the most important topic in the course. Not because they're lazy. Because after twenty years, those three bullets genuinely feel complete. Everything else is "common sense," which is expert for "things I no longer remember learning."

Same disease. Opposite symptoms. And the treatment for both starts with the same move: never diagnose SME content by its quality. Diagnose the compression behind it.

[chunk: two pictures from Dean's work] (suggested block: media-text or plain text, first person)

In a pharmaceutical project, my SMEs were research scientists. Brilliant people, zero teaching background. Their source material assumed you knew what a dozen acronyms meant and skipped steps that were obvious to them and to nobody else on earth. I spent half that project asking questions that felt embarrassingly basic. Those questions were the work. Every one of them surfaced something learners would have tripped on.

And I once watched a junior designer inherit content from a compliance expert and build a sixty-slide course for pharmacy technicians that listed every regulation the expert had mentioned. Factually perfect. Completely unusable. A new hire can't absorb sixty slides of regulations, and the expert never claimed they could. Nobody had asked the expert what mattered most, so everything shipped at equal weight.

[chunk: raw ore] (suggested block: takeaway callout)

Messy content is not a verdict on your SME, and it is not a verdict on you. It is raw ore. The refining is your job, and the full course gives you the tools in Modules 3 and 4.

[chunk: when not to blame compression] (suggested block: warning callout)

Sometimes thin content is not compression. It is disengagement. The expert who sends three bullets because the knowledge compressed will happily talk for an hour if you ask the right question. The expert who sends three bullets because they want out of the project will dodge the conversation too. You can't tell the difference from the content. You can tell it from the behaviour around the content, and that is the next lesson.

Lesson 3. What Your SME Has at Stake

Time: 15 minutes Objective: Identify which of four stakes is driving an expert's behaviour, using observable evidence.

[chunk: the question nobody asks]

When a project starts, everybody asks what the SME knows. Almost nobody asks what the SME risks. But the risks drive the behaviour you'll spend the next eight weeks living with.

Think about what you're actually requesting when you ask an expert to help build a course. You're asking for hours they don't have, taken from the job they're measured on. You're asking to take their professional knowledge, change its form, and publish it where colleagues and strangers will judge it, with their name attached and the final wording out of their hands. And you are probably the third or fourth person in their career to show up with a process and a template and a smile.

Put that way, SME resistance stops looking like a character flaw. It starts looking reasonable. That shift in your head is worth more than any template in this course.

[chunk: the four stakes] (suggested block: accordion or flashcards, one per stake; or hotspots on a four-box map graphic)

Time. Helping you is unpaid overtime. The SME's real job didn't shrink when your project started. When time is the dominant stake, you'll see deflection, delays, one-line answers and meeting no-shows. None of it is about you.

Reputation. Their name goes on content they don't fully control. If the course is wrong, or just embarrassing, they absorb the damage in front of the audience that matters most to them: their peers. When reputation is the stake, you'll see nitpicking, heavy edits and resistance to simplification. Every simplification looks, to them, like a chance to be wrong in public.

Control. Your process takes their material and does things to it out of their sight. Experts who've been burned by that will demand approval over everything, rewrite your drafts back toward their original, or refuse to hand over material at all. Control-seeking is fear of misrepresentation with a process wrapped around it.

History. You inherit every bad experience this person has ever had with training, trainers and people who look like you. The vendor course that taught the wrong procedure. The workshop that wasted a day. The last ID who promised collaboration and delivered a template. You weren't there for any of it, and you'll pay for all of it until you prove otherwise.

[chunk: the resistance decoder] (suggested block: table, four rows)

The stakes are invisible. The behaviour is not. A rough decoder:

Rough is the operative word. The decoder tells you what to check first, not what is true. You confirm by asking, usually at the kickoff, and Module 2 gives you the exact questions.

[chunk: three quick pictures] (suggested block: carousel or tabs, three cards, each labelled fictional)

These three are fictional. Each is a pattern you'll meet. My own stories cluster in the industries I worked, so these are here to show the same stakes wearing other uniforms.

A chief of surgery is the SME for an operating room safety module. She rewrites every caption, questions every diagram, and escalates a disagreement about a checklist illustration to the chief medical officer. Exhausting, until you see the stake: residents she trains will quote this module back to her, and any error surfaces at the morbidity conference with her name attached. Reputation. The fix was never about captions. It was about giving her an accuracy gate she could trust.

A nonprofit founder is the SME for volunteer onboarding. Every draft comes back rewritten into the story of how she started the organisation in her garage. The training needs procedures, and she keeps deleting them. The stake is history and control together: the organisation is her biography, and handing its story to a contractor feels like losing custody of it. The fix started with keeping her origin story in the opening, on purpose, with her byline.

A government program officer gives you exactly fifteen minutes a month and answers only the question you asked. Nothing about you: it's audit season, her team is down two analysts, and your course is the eleventh most important thing on her desk. Time, purely. The fix was smaller asks on her calendar's terms, not better questions.

[chunk: sort activity] (suggested block: sort, four categories)

Activity: Which stake is talking?

Instructions: Drag each behaviour into the stake it most likely signals. Use the decoder. Remember it tells you what to check first, not what is certainly true.

Categories: Time, Reputation, Control, History.

Items and correct categories:

1. "Honestly not sure what we'd cover for an hour. My calendar is a disaster until mid-quarter." → Time
2. Gives you fifteen minutes a month and answers only the question you asked, never a word more. → Time
3. Replies to your six questions with one line: "Just work from the manual." → Time
4. Rewrites every caption and questions every diagram in a safety module her residents will quote back to her. → Reputation
5. Pushes back on every simplification: "Say it that way and a peer will call it wrong." → Reputation
6. Interrupts your questions, twice, to ask exactly who will see her content before it publishes. → Control
7. Rewrites your draft back toward his original wording, every round. → Control
8. "I want to see everything before it goes anywhere." → Control
9. First words on the call: "The last training somebody built made my team look like idiots." → History
10. "This won't change anything. The last one didn't either." → History

Feedback on completion: Notice there's no silence on this board. Silence doesn't sort. It could be any of the four, which is why the decoder's answer for silence is "go find out." Item 6 is a control signal with reputation usually underneath; if you put it in Reputation you weren't wrong, you were one layer deeper.

[chunk: the Meridian walkthrough, setup] (suggested block: media-text with Ray's email shown as a quote block; label the whole chunk "Fictional case")

Here's what the stakes look like in practice, on the Meridian case. Reminder: Meridian is the fictional project that runs through this course. Ray Ostrowski is the SME, an engineering manager with eighteen years at the company, sixteen of them on the road as a field tech. Your kickoff invitation has sat unanswered for two days. This morning, this arrived:

From: R. Ostrowski Re: Onboarding course kickoff

Got your invite. Honestly not sure what we'd cover for an hour. The procedures are all documented and my calendar is a disaster until mid-quarter. Can you work from the service manual and my slide deck from the tech summit? Attaching both. If something's unclear the senior techs can probably answer it.

R.

The attachments: a 212-page service manual, and 74 slides, about half of them photos of analyzer internals with no captions.

[chunk: the Meridian walkthrough, reading the email] (suggested block: hotspots on the email image, one per phrase; or reveal, "what do you notice?" then Dean's read)

First pass. I'll read Ray's email and mark what I notice.

"Not sure what we'd cover for an hour." Two things in one line. He read the invite as costing him an hour, which I never said. And "not sure what we'd cover" tells me he thinks the content already exists in finished form. That's the under-explainer pattern from Lesson 2, before I've even met him.

"My calendar is a disaster until mid-quarter." Time stake, said plainly. People usually hand you one stake for free. It is rarely the whole story.

"Can you work from the service manual and my slide deck?" Deflection. The decoder says deflection means time, and that fits. But look at what he attached: 212 pages plus 74 slides. A man with no time assembled and sent material within two days. That effort is telling me something the words aren't. He wants this course to be right. He doesn't want to be in the room while it happens.

[chunk: the Meridian walkthrough, the brief]

Now the project brief. Three years ago, corporate rolled out a vendor-built course that taught a power-down sequence two revisions out of date. Ray's team spent a year fielding calls from hospital staff who noticed techs doing it "the training way." Ray personally wrote the correction memo. Nobody at corporate responded. There's the history stake, and it's a big one.

And notice how it got summarised around the office: "Ray hates training." That summary is wrong in a useful way. Ray hates what training did to his team. Different thing.

[chunk: Ray's stakes map] (suggested block: table or a filled-in four-box graphic)

Time: Real and stated. Manager workload plus field escalations. Availability will come in small windows, on his terms.

Reputation: Strong but implied. "If Ray says the course is right, it's right." His standing with his own techs is the currency here. A course that makes his team look stupid spends it.

Control: Moderate, watch for it. He sent materials instead of offering conversation. He may try to review everything at the end rather than take part along the way.

History: The dominant stake. Documented, specific, never resolved. He isn't guessing that training goes wrong. He has a memo.

Bottom line: Ray's resistance is probably about history first and time second. He'll engage if engagement visibly protects his team from a repeat, and every ask must fit inside a small time budget.

[chunk: three ways to reply] (suggested block: reveal, three openers with "which one does the map rule out?" then the answer; or tabs)

The map should change what I do next. Three ways I could open my reply to Ray.

Option one: "Our process requires a kickoff meeting with all SMEs." True, and dead on arrival. It answers a history wound with more process.

Option two: "The manual and deck are a great start, I'll build from these and send you a draft." Feels accommodating. It books me a review ambush in week five, because he sees nothing until it's finished.

Option three: "The deck and manual are exactly what I needed to start. Twenty minutes with you buys the one thing they can't tell me: what the last training got wrong for your techs, so this one doesn't repeat it."

Twenty minutes, not an hour: fits the time budget. Names the history stake without psychoanalysing him. Makes the meeting about protecting his team, which is the stake underneath everything else. Ten minutes of reading, four boxes, one sentence, and my first move went from generic to aimed.

[chunk: two rules and a boundary] (suggested block: callouts, important for the rules, warning for the boundary)

The map is private. It's a thinking tool, not a personnel file. Nobody sees it but you, and it never goes in a project folder. Writing "Ray fears being embarrassed" in a shared drive is how you create the history stake for the next designer.

Map patterns, not moments. One late reply is a Tuesday. Three late replies with shrinking answers is a signal. If you catch yourself psychoanalysing a single email, close the map and go do something else.

When not to use this. Skip the stakes analysis when the collaboration is already working. If your SME is responsive, honest and engaged, you don't need a diagnosis, and running one anyway turns a healthy relationship into a specimen. And don't use the map to explain away project problems. If content is late because the project has no executive support, no stakes map fixes that.

[chunk: reflection] (suggested block: reflection, free text with sample answer)

Reflection: Read one expert

Prompt: Think of an expert you've worked with, or use Ray if you haven't yet. Which stake do you think was driving their behaviour? Write two or three sentences: the behaviour you observed, the stake you suspect, and one thing you'd do differently in your next interaction because of it. Behaviour only. "Slow to reply" is evidence. "Doesn't care" is a conclusion.

Sample answer: "My SME on a compliance refresher answered every question with the shortest possible sentence and twice asked who would be approving the final wording. I read that as control with reputation underneath, not time: she was spending time on process questions, which someone with no time wouldn't do. Next time I'd show her the review plan in the first meeting, before she has to ask, so the approval gate is visible from day one."

[editor note] The sample answer is a generic composite written for this teaser, not a Dean story. If the ID wants a Ray version instead: behaviour = deflecting the meeting and sending 212 pages; stake = history first, time second; change = ask for twenty minutes framed around what the last training got wrong.

Lesson 4. Translator, Advocate, Driver

Time: 12 minutes Objective: Choose the translator, advocate and driver functions over the three postures that fail, and apply them to a reluctant expert.

[chunk: three postures that fail] (suggested block: tabs or accordion, three items)

Now flip the table around. You know what the SME risks. What exactly are you, in this relationship? I've watched new instructional designers default into three postures, and all three fail.

The stenographer. Whatever the expert says goes in the course, formatted nicely. It feels respectful. It is actually abandonment: the learners have no one representing them, and the course becomes a well-designed data dump. If the SME wanted a typist, they could hire one for a lot less than you cost.

The adversary. You know learning science, they know content, and every meeting is a negotiation over territory. Some IDs are taught this posture in school, dressed up as "learner advocacy." It produces courses that experts refuse to review and quietly bad-mouth. You can't build a course against your only source of truth.

The ghost. You take the material, disappear for five weeks, and come back with a finished product for approval. It feels efficient. It's a trap. The expert, cut out of the process, experiences your draft as a surprise, and surprises get defended against. Some of the worst review blowups in my career grew in exactly this silence.

[chunk: the three functions] (suggested block: process, three steps; or statement for the opening line)

The posture that works is not a compromise between those three. It is a different job with three functions.

You translate. Between the expert's compressed knowledge and the learner's day one. Both directions: you also translate the learner's reality back to the expert, who usually hasn't been a beginner in decades.

You advocate. For the learner, in rooms the learner is never in. When the expert says all sixty slides are critical, you're the one person on the project whose job is to ask "critical to whom, on which day?"

You drive. The project, so the expert never has to. You run the process, send the recaps, chase the approvals, and make contributing to your course the easiest professional obligation on their calendar. Experts don't resent process. They resent process they have to manage.

[chunk: where standing comes from] (suggested block: tip callout)

Notice what's missing from that list: outranking anyone. You'll never out-expert your expert, and if you're early in your career, you won't outrank anyone in the building. Your standing comes from somewhere else: preparation and reliability, compounded.

That is buildable. Small, concrete things. Read their material before the first meeting and open with a question that proves it. Send a three-bullet recap within a day, every time. Ship something tiny in week one so they see how you work before anything is at risk. None of it is clever. Together it makes you the most reliable professional your expert has dealt with, and reliability is what experts actually need from us. The full course turns this into a checklist of eight moves for the first two weeks.

[chunk: for the veterans] (suggested block: note callout, labelled "If you've been doing this a while")

If you've been doing this for years, you already have a default posture, and it drifted toward one of the three failures without asking you. The tell is which complaint you hear most. "You're the expert, whatever you think" means you've drifted stenographer. Experts going quiet on you means adversary. Review blowups mean ghost. I still check, twenty-five years in.

[chunk: branching scenario] (suggested block: scenario, three scenes, three endings)

Scenario: "Just build it from my deck"

Label on screen: Fictional. B2B software. Characters invented.

Setup

You're three days into a customer-onboarding course at a software company. Your SME is Priya Raghavan, the company's most senior solutions engineer: twelve years, the person account teams request by name for the hardest implementations. Your kickoff invite has sat for two days. This morning she replied:

I don't really have time for meetings on this. I'm attaching my deck from the sales enablement session, everything's in there. Just build it from that and I can look at it when it's done.

Priya

The deck: 74 slides. About half are screenshots with no speaker notes.

Scene 1: Your reply

Choice A. Take the deck and run. Reply thanks, build from the deck, send her the finished draft in three weeks. → Goes to Ending: Fail. Coach note: The deck was never the content. It was the visible half of twelve years of judgment, and the invisible half is where courses live. You just chose the ghost posture on day one.

Choice B. Hold the process line. Reply that a kickoff is required for all SME-supported projects and propose three times. → Goes to Scene 2 (variant: "She accepts the Tuesday slot, twenty minutes late, laptop open, answering messages.") Coach note: You answered a time objection with an authority claim. You got the meeting and lost the room. Workable, barely.

Choice C. Shrink the ask and name the cost of skipping it. Reply that the deck is a strong start, and twenty minutes buys the one thing it can't tell you: what past onboarding got wrong for customers, so this course doesn't repeat it. You offer to run to her clock. → Goes to Scene 2 (variant: "Two days of silence. Then: 'Fine. Thursday 4:40, I have a hard stop at 5.' Not warmth. A crack in the door.") Coach note: Small ask, named payoff, her expertise kept central, zero process language. You read the time stake and guessed there was history under it.

Scene 2: The guarded twenty minutes

Priya arrives cordial and closed: one-line answers, eyes on the clock. Your prepared questions are landing like an audit.

Choice A. Push through the question list. You prepared twelve questions and there are eleven left. → Goes to Scene 3 (variant: "You're nine questions in. She glances at the clock, and then says something you didn't ask about.") Coach note: The list was serving you, not the conversation. Experts don't open up on a schedule. You still get a chance, because she's about to hand you the real agenda anyway.

Choice B. Drop the list, go concrete. Put the questions away and ask one thing: "Walk me through the last implementation you were proud of. What did the customer's team struggle with in the first month?" → Goes to Scene 3 (variant: "Eight seconds of silence. Then she turns her laptop around, pulls up an architecture diagram, and talks for nine minutes without stopping. Then she stops mid-sentence.") Coach note: Abstraction interrogates. Concrete episodes invite. The pride question tells her that her judgment, not just her slides, is what you came for.

Choice C. Cut it short gracefully. "I can tell this week is crushing you. I'll work from the deck and flag questions as they come up." → Goes to Ending: Neutral. Coach note: Kindness is right. Surrender is not the only kind. Shrinking the ask beats abandoning it.

Scene 3: The real objection surfaces

"Look. The last course somebody built from my material was embarrassing. I spent a year answering tickets from customers it confused, and I ended up re-teaching everything on live calls anyway. No offence, but I don't have another year for that."

Choice A. Reassure. "That won't happen this time. I'll make sure of it." → Goes to Ending: Neutral. Coach note: Kind, sincere and unearned. She has heard "this time is different" before, from someone with a title very much like yours. Trust responds to structure, not to promises about structure.

Choice B. Treat it as the real kickoff. "Then this is the most useful thing we could talk about. What specifically did it get wrong?" Take visible notes. Then propose the safeguard: she sees the outline before you build, every technical section routes to her first, and nothing publishes that she hasn't stamped. → Goes to Ending: Success. Coach note: Her reluctance was never about time. You named the wound, gave it somewhere official to go, and answered the control stake with real control at defined checkpoints.

Choice C. Defend the profession. "That's why this project follows a proper instructional design process, with structured review and quality checkpoints." → Goes to Ending: Fail. Coach note: Process vocabulary is what burned her. Answering a wound with the instrument that made it is the fastest exit from the room.

Ending: Success

She looks at your notes, then at you. "Nobody asked me that after the last one either." The remaining minutes run past her hard stop, at her choice. On Friday, unprompted, she sends three annotated screenshots "for the sections people always get wrong."

Debrief: Priya's "I don't have time" was three stakes wearing one sentence: real time pressure, a documented burn, and a loss of control she was refusing to repeat. The deck was her compromise, help without exposure. You shrank the ask until yes was cheap, traded your question list for a concrete episode, and when the real objection surfaced you treated it as the agenda and answered it with structure she could verify. That is the stakes map cashed in, and the driver function doing its job: you ran the process so she never had to.

Ending: Neutral

The project proceeds. You build from the deck plus whatever fragments she sends, days late and in pieces. The course ships on time and is fine. In review, she corrects eleven things you couldn't have known, politely, and never volunteers a twelfth. You'll never find out what the last course got wrong, because you never asked, or you asked and then promised instead of planning.

Debrief: Nothing here failed loudly. That's the problem with the neutral path: it feels like a win. You got a course, but you didn't get the expert, and every gap she filled in review was a gap you could have closed in twenty minutes if the real objection had been given somewhere to go. Kindness and reassurance are not wrong. They are weightless on their own. Next time, pair them with a structure she can see: an outline before the build, her stamp before anything ships.

Ending: Fail

Week four. Priya returns your draft with 61 comments, a third of them variations of "this is not how it works." The rework costs more than five kickoffs. She now believes the project confirms what she suspected: training people guess. Somewhere in the building, her version of this story is being told at lunch, and you're not the sympathetic character in it.

Debrief: Two routes land here, and they share a cause. Building from the deck alone is the ghost posture: she saw nothing until it was finished, and surprises get defended against. Answering her burn with "proper process" filed you under the same category as whoever built the last embarrassing course. In both cases, authority did the work that reading the stakes should have done. The fix is not confidence. It's twenty minutes, one concrete question, and a safeguard she can check.

[chunk: what actually happened] (suggested block: quote or note callout, labelled "Dean's version, composite")

Composite: two experts merged, details changed. The Priya in my career was an expert who answered my kickoff invite with "everything you need is in the files." The files were extensive and the gaps were enormous, and the person was carrying exactly this kind of burn from a previous course. What turned it was small asks on their clock and one safeguard made structural: nothing ships without their stamp. The same person who dodged my first three emails ended up sending me corrections at eleven at night, unasked, because the course had quietly become theirs too. That arc, reluctant to invested, is the single most repeatable thing I know about experts.

[chunk: knowledge check] (suggested block: quiz, single choice, per-choice feedback)

Knowledge check: five questions

Q1. Your SME, a senior engineer, sends three bullet points for the topic the project brief calls "the critical module." The most likely explanation is:

• A. He's disengaged from the project and needs to be escalated. Feedback: Possible, but you can't diagnose disengagement from one thin artifact; it shows in the behaviour around the content, not the content alone.
• B. Expertise compression: after years of practice, the intermediate steps are no longer visible to him. Correct. Feedback: After eighteen years, those three bullets genuinely feel complete to him. The steps between them stopped being conscious knowledge a long time ago.
• C. He's testing whether you know the subject well enough to fill the gaps. Feedback: Experts almost never test IDs, and reading it that way makes you adversarial on day one.

Q2. In your first meeting, an SME interrupts your questions twice to ask exactly who will see her content before it publishes. Which stake is she most likely signalling?

• A. Time: she wants the meeting over. Feedback: Time pressure looks like deflection and short answers; process questions cost time, and she's choosing to spend it.
• B. Reputation and control: she's worried about how her material will be represented. Correct. Feedback: Repeated questions about visibility and approval are control signals, with reputation usually underneath. The answer is a real approval gate she can trust.
• C. History: a specific past training burned her. Feedback: Possible, but people with a history wound usually reference the event; read the direct signal first and ask about history at the kickoff.

Q3. You're new to the field. Your SME has eighteen years of standing. Your most reliable source of credibility in week one is:

• A. Demonstrating your knowledge of learning science and instructional models. Feedback: Pedagogy vocabulary reads as jargon and rank-pulling, especially to an expert who's been burned by process people before.
• B. Agreeing with their content decisions until trust is established. Feedback: Agreement you don't mean is deferred conflict; it resurfaces at review, the most expensive place to have it.
• C. Preparation and reliable process: knowing their material, tiny fast deliverables, recaps within 24 hours. Correct. Feedback: You can't outrank expertise, and you don't need to. Reliability is what an expert needs from you, and it's fully in your control from day one.

Q4. A normally responsive SME misses one content deadline. According to this module, you should:

• A. Fill out a stakes map to diagnose the resistance underneath. Feedback: The map is for repeated behaviour; psychoanalysing a single event turns a healthy relationship into a specimen.
• B. Treat it as noise unless it repeats, and nudge normally. Correct. Feedback: One slip is a Tuesday. Nudge like a normal colleague and move on.
• C. Raise it gently in your next one-on-one as a pattern you're seeing. Feedback: Calling one instance "a pattern" is inaccurate and mildly insulting, and it damages the trust you're trying to build.

Q5. An SME says "cut the safety caveats, the audience knows all that," and the ID replies "you're the expert" and cuts them. Which posture is the ID taking?

• A. Translator. Feedback: A translator would check what the caveats protect and whether the newest learner in the audience actually knows them.
• B. Stenographer. Correct. Feedback: Transcribing the expert's preference without weighing the learner's need is stenography, even when it feels like respect.
• C. Advocate. Feedback: An advocate would ask "the audience as of which day?" The expert is remembering colleagues, not new hires.

[chunk: self-rating] (suggested block: rating, 1 to 5, optional; the ID can drop it if the module runs long)

How consistently do you read an SME's resistance or silence as information, and adjust your approach instead of just enduring it?

• 1 to 2: You've been taking deflection personally. The decoder in Lesson 3 is your starting point: next time, name the stake before you reply.
• 3: You read it sometimes. The gap is usually evidence. Write down the behaviour before you decide what it means.
• 4 to 5: You already do this. The full course's job aids turn it into a repeatable ten-minute habit, and Module 6 covers the cases where reading isn't enough.

[chunk: module close and tease] (suggested block: statement, then a continue gate or end card)

You can now read an expert's behaviour as information about what helping you costs them. You know the four stakes, the three functions, and the three postures that fail. And you've seen what Ray's email is really saying.

What you haven't done yet is reply to it.

Module 2, The Kickoff, is that meeting. Twenty minutes with Ray, the seven questions to ask in order, and the one-page brief you write before you leave the room. It opens with a story of mine about a project where an executive and I each had a clear picture of the finished course, the pictures didn't match, and nobody found out until there was real work to disagree about.

Part 4. Design notes

Tone

Peer to peer, the way an experienced colleague talks to a newer one over coffee. No cheerleading, no guru voice. Dean's real stories (sculpture course, pharma scientists, pharmacy-tech sixty slides, the "what actually happened" composite) are first person and told as they happened. Meridian and Ray, Priya, the surgeon, the nonprofit founder and the program officer are third person and labelled fictional the first time they appear in each lesson. The "what actually happened" sidebar is labelled composite because the source labels it that way.

Contractions are fine. Short sentences. One idea per paragraph. No em dashes anywhere, including in the scenario and quiz text.

Accent colour

Suggest a deep teal, #0E5A56. White text on it measures about 8:1, so it works for buttons, the statement block and the scenario's Coach notes without a second colour. It sits near the main site's teal token without being the same, so the course reads as Dean's without borrowing the portfolio's low-contrast light-section teal. Pair it with a warm off-white page background and near-black body text. If the ID wants a second accent for warning callouts, keep it muted; the content is calm and the colours should be too.

Course cover concept

A simple line map with three pins and two thin arcs connecting them: Barcelona, New York, Hawaii. No faces, no stock photos of meetings. Title set large: "The Human Side of Instructional Design." Subtitle: "Working with Subject Matter Experts." Below it, small: "Module 1, free: Think Like Your SME." The map ties directly to the hook story and says "distance between people" without a slogan. Alternative if the map reads as travel: the four-box stakes map, empty, with one box filled in by hand.

What the end of Module 1 should tease about Module 2

Three things, in this order, all already in the module close chunk above:

1. The unfinished action. Learners have read Ray's email and ruled out two replies. They haven't sent the third. Module 2 is where they do.
2. The concrete deliverable. A 25-minute agenda with seven questions in a set order, and a one-page kickoff brief sent for confirmation within 24 hours.
3. Dean's story. The project where he and an executive sponsor each carried a different picture of the finished product, and nobody found out until real work existed to disagree about.

Don't tease the whole course here. One module at a time.

Numbers, names and claims, with sources

What was deliberately left out of the teaser

• Exercises 1 and 2 (map your SME, trust plan), the SME Read assignment and its rubric, the cheat sheet, and the two job-aid downloads. The full course delivers them. The landing page doesn't promise downloads from the free module for this reason; if the ID wants to include JA-13 as a download, the worked examples in it are already consistent with this doc.
• The "when the roles collapse" caveat (when you are the SME) from 1.4, cut for time.
• Sam Whitfield, the second worked example in JA-13 (the friendly SME whose stake is time). Worth restoring if the module runs under 35 minutes.
• Hype language and the "thousands of designers" line from the original sales copy. Nothing in the source files supports a learner count, so none appears.