Your Learning Project Stakeholder Made You Do It? Really?

Earlier this week I shared my thoughts on a webinar that demonstrated the capabilities of Claude to build an eLearning course.

While acknowledging that what Claude can do is impressive, I made the point that building the wrong stuff faster doesn’t get us to delivering value any quicker. I got quite the response and think one thread in the comments deserves further exploration. While most IDs agreed with the premise, many felt boxed in by stakeholders who just want fast - quality be damned.

I want to push back on that. 

In my experience,most stakeholders care about three things:

1. Outcomes: Can you help me achieve my goals?

2. Productivity: Can you deliver a solution efficiently with minimal disruption?

3. Their time: Can you minimize the time you need from me and my key people to get this done?

None of those require us to blindly accept, “I need a course,” but you will get brushed off if you don’t address them.  Instead of fighting the urgency, here are some strategies for redirecting the conversation to the outcome they actually care about?

Outcomes: Can You Help Me Achieve My Goals?

Before discussing content, courses, or modalities, ask: What business result needs to change? Who needs to perform differently for that to happen? What specifically do they need to do differently? Where are they struggling today?

That doesn't require a six-week needs analysis. It means getting very precise, very quickly.

Our stance with the stakeholder should be: “We’ll design around the performance you need, not simply the content you give us.” That may lead to a course. But it may also reveal that people already know what to do and need practice, feedback, coaching, better information at the point of work, or a barrier removed.

Our job isn't to challenge the stakeholder's requested solution just for the sake of challenging it. It's to make sure what we deliver has a reasonable chance of producing the outcome they're accountable for.

Productivity: Can You Deliver Efficiently With Minimal Disruption?

This is where being targeted and personalized matters.

Don't automatically build something for 5,000 people because 5,000 people share a job title or sit somewhere on a distribution list.

Ask: “Who actually needs to perform differently—and do they all need the same thing?”

Maybe new employees need foundational knowledge. Experienced employees need practice with difficult situations. Managers need coaching tools. One region needs help with a particular process while another doesn't. 

Historically, designing for those differences could get expensive. So we compromised. We built one 60-minute course that tried to give everyone everything they might possibly need.

AI changes the economics of personalization. It may now be faster and less expensive to create ten highly targeted 15-minute experiences for ten different audiences than one generic 60-minute course designed to cover everyone.

Show stakeholders the math. If 5,000 employees take a 60-minute course, that's 5,000 hours away from work. If each person instead gets the 15 minutes that's relevant to their needs, that's 1,250 hours. We've potentially saved 3,750 hours of employee time while providing a more relevant experience.

Personalization doesn't have to mean some elaborate adaptive-learning platform. Sometimes it simply means different people get different things because they have different needs. Not every audience needs every element.

Our commitment to the stakeholder becomes: “We’ll target the right people and give each audience only what they need to improve.”

Their Time: Can You Minimize What You Need From Me and My People?

This is another place where I think we need to rethink how we work. There's an old saying that we're all better critics than creators. Yet our traditional process often asks stakeholders and SMEs to create for us.

• Tell us what employees need to know.

• Walk us through the content.

• Help us outline the course.

• Sit through interviews while we ask question after question.

Or, worst of all: “Can you give us the content?”

With the information already available in most organizations and AI to help us make sense of it, we should be able to get 80% of the way there ourselves. Give us access to existing documentation. Performance data. Call recordings. Customer feedback. Work samples. Policies. CRM data. Quality reports. Whatever evidence already exists.

Let us use AI to help analyze it. Identify patterns. Surface common mistakes. Compare strong and weak performance. Synthesize information. Develop hypotheses about what's getting in the way.

Then put something in front of the stakeholder.

Our interaction with stakeholders becomes: “Here’s what we think the performance problem is. Here are the three barriers we see. Here’s who we think needs help. And here’s what we recommend doing about it. What are we missing?”

Now we're asking stakeholders to react, correct and refine rather than asking them to create the answer for us. That's a much better use of their time.

Maybe “Fast” Isn't the Enemy

So when a stakeholder says, “I need this fast,” I don't think our choices are limited to blindly accepting the requested solution or becoming the L&D team that slows everything down in pursuit of perfection.

There's a third option.

Understand the outcome. Target the right audience. Diagnose just enough. Personalize around what different people actually need. Architect the smallest solution likely to improve performance. Use AI to do more of the heavy lifting.

Then move fast.