They say two heads are better than one. In the world of training design, I’d say this is very, very true.
I’ve been working with an SME from a client’s organization for several months on a project. He’s very smart and very experienced. We’ve taken old training programs that he’s put together and laid out the framework for a new, killer training program.
I designed a bunch of activities and discussion opportunities.
Then I needed realistic content for a series of case studies, scenarios and role play ideas. We were designing three days’ worth of training, so we needed a lot. After a while, we realized they all started to sound the same. Same issues. Same customer problems. Same variables.
When we reflected on this, it made a lot of sense. Each of us only has so much experience. We only see so many problems. Even when we think we’ve “seen it all”, we haven’t. Not even close.
We realized we needed to call in the calvary. We grabbed a second SME for half of a day and suddenly ideas began to flow again. Different scenarios. Different challenges. Different problems. Different variables. One SME would begin setting up a case study and the other would jump in and say: what if we mixed in this variable?
The sum of what we were creating was truly greater than the individual parts. We never would have been able to come up with the variety of case studies, scenarios and role play ideas if I had only worked with one or the other. We needed to put together both heads.
If you’re looking for greater creativity, greater variety of ideas, greater end products for your training content, two (or three or four) heads are almost always better than one.
