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The Bumper-Lane Analogy In the world of corporate learning, we have a bizarre habit of protecting adults from the consequences of their own choices. We build a module on handling difficult conversations, but we lock the navigation into a single linear path. We give them a "Next" button and pretend we are teaching empathy. Imagine watching a toddler bowl with the bumper rails up. They hurl the ball down the lane. It ricochets off the sides five times and eventually knocks over

Have you gone down the vibe coding rabbit hole yet? Vibe coding for instructional designers is the new Alice in Wonderland. You open the door and everything inside looks fascinating. Magical creatures. Impossible things being built in real time. People showing off interactive eLearning content they coded in an afternoon with nothing but a prompt. Then you see the little bottle on the table. Drink me. So you drink. You describe the interaction you want. The AI writes some HTML

In instructional design, we have a bad habit of assuming that "Time Spent" equals "Value Gained." We think that if we force a learner to stop and stare at a blinking cursor for five minutes, we are facilitating a breakthrough. In reality, we are just being the "Annoying Neighbor." The Porch Trap Analogy Imagine you’ve just finished a long day. You pull into your driveway, get out of the car, and head for the front door. Your neighbor is standing there. In a normal world, you

There is a fine line between "guiding" a learner and "escorting" them. In most software walkthroughs, we aren't just guiding; we are basically putting them in a digital stroller and pushing them through the interface. We take a screenshot, draw a giant box around the "Submit" button, and tell them to click it. We think we’re being helpful. We think we’re making the training "seamless." In reality, we are just treating a room full of professionals like toddlers at an Easter eg

There is a specific type of fatigue that only exists in corporate training. It’s the "Next-Button Trance." It happens somewhere around slide 14, right between the updated fire safety protocols and the new policy on shared refrigerator etiquette. The learner stops reading. They stop processing. They enter a rhythmic, Pavlovian state where they wait for the "Next" button to turn blue, click it, and repeat until they reach the quiz—which they will then guess their way through us

In the world of corporate learning, we have a strange obsession with the "Initialism." We love to take a perfectly good phrase and chop it down into three or four capital letters until it sounds like a secret code for a club no one invited you to join. We hand a new hire a manual on Monday morning that’s essentially a 40-page game of Scrabble. We tell them, "Just learn the lingo, and you'll be fine." But here is the physical reality of what we’re asking their brain to do: Ima