Praxis Creative Studio

For years, I operated under the traditional L&D model: The “Instructional Design Factory.”

In this model, SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) dump messy, unorganized content on my desk, and I, the “professional designer,” spend weeks polishing it into a course. It feels safe. It feels high-quality. But it’s a huge scalability trap in corporate learning.

If your L&D team is acting as a “ticket-taker” for simple course updates, your strategy is broken. You aren’t an architect; you’re a bottleneck.

During my time as Senior Instructional Designer at CoorsTek and later at SC Johnson, I realized that my most valuable contribution wasn’t building the training—it was building the system that allowed the experts to build it themselves.

The Blueprint

We were facing massive turnover in manufacturing roles. We needed plant-floor simulations, technical competency tools, and onboarding that didn’t just dump info, but validated real-world performance.

Instead of locking myself in a design cave, I pivoted to an SME-Led Authoring Framework. Here’s how we did it:

1. Stop “Polishing,” Start “Templating”: I stopped accepting raw data. Instead, I built standardized, brand-compliant authoring templates. By using tools like PowerPoint and Word, I removed the “how to design” friction. SMEs didn’t need to learn Storyline or think about branching logic—they just needed to fill in the templates I created.
2. Shift the Role of the ID: I moved from “Content Creator” to “Content Architect.” My job became maintaining the governance, accessibility, and adult learning theory, while the factory-floor experts became the authors.
3. Governance vs. Freedom: This is the magic formula. We set up clear guardrails—the visual look, the accessibility standards, and the assessment structure. Inside those guardrails, SMEs had full creative autonomy.

The Result?

We moved from a 3-month production cycle to a 3-day turnaround for critical technical modules. More importantly, the training was more accurate because it was built by the people who actually do the work every day.

Democratization is the Future

The future of L&D isn’t hoarding the authoring license; it’s distributing it. If you want to scale enterprise learning, you have to trust your SMEs to be the teachers. When you give them the right tools—intuitive, template-based environments that allow them to produce compliant, professional content—you stop being a bottleneck and start being a transformation partner.

Stop building the content. Build the ecosystem that builds the content for you.

#LearningAndDevelopment #SMEEmpowerment #InstructionalDesign #CorporateTraining #LearningStrategy