What If Everything You Wanted Were Possible?

A training idea often arrives in a single sentence: “What if the employee could truly see the outcome of this decision?” Then that sentence falls into a budget spreadsheet, a technical feasibility meeting, and eventually the folder labelled “we can’t do this in the current system.”

This is a strange habit in the L&D world. People know that learning is strengthened by experience; then they try to fit experience into a few boxes available in the tool they have. Add text. Insert a video. Ask a question. Move to the next page. All useful tools, make no mistake. But sometimes the subject is not about transferring information. Sometimes you need to convey the pressure of choosing the right equipment in a warehouse, how the wrong sentence erodes trust in a customer meeting, or the impact of an HSE decision within seconds.

That is when the difference between content production and learning experience design becomes visible.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” [Attributed to Benjamin Franklin]

Whether the attribution to Franklin is definitive is debated, but it is interesting that the sentence has endured for so long in learning design. Because its core idea remains true: people remember not only what they are told, but the outcome of the choice they make.

The problem is not a shortage of ideas, but a shortage of design

L&D professionals do not usually say, “We need a new training idea.” The phrase I hear more often is closer to this:

• “Can we make this more realistic?”
• “What if the employee made a decision instead of just watching?”
• “What if we showed the consequences of making mistakes in this process safely?”
• “What if this training sounded like the everyday language of our organisation?”

None of these questions is technical. They are all about design.

Yet the traditional workflow tends to immediately break the idea into technical components:

This shift may seem small, but its outcome is significant. When tool selection starts to come before design intent, training is imagined only to the extent that the tools allow.

It is like a carpenter working with only a hammer: every idea turns into a nail. After a while, you start seeing nails rather than problems.

What I find interesting is this: the same L&D leader can say, “People do not attend training,” in one meeting, then say, “Let’s not make this training too interactive; it should finish quickly,” in the next. Perhaps it is not a contradiction, but two different pressures meeting in the same person. Time on one side, retention on the other. It is difficult to protect both at once.

The blocks in the catalogue are an alphabet, not the whole language

Text, video, PDF, quizzes, branching, checkpoints, confirmations, and clickable areas are powerful building blocks. Within Nextrain, they can be used to create decision-based scenarios, interactive videos, in-content references, and assessments.

For example, an employee encounters a customer objection in a video; they make a choice; that choice takes them to a different scene. This is richer than the logic of “select the correct answer”: it establishes the context of the decision.

But every building block suggests a grammar. A quiz teaches answering; branching teaches choosing a route; a hotspot teaches noticing; and a checkpoint teaches pausing and verifying. The critical question for the designer is:

What mental action does the learner need to take?

• Recognise a risk?
• Put a sequence in the right order?
• Find missing information?
• Prioritise under pressure?
• Compare multiple outcomes?
• See the impact of the same event on different stakeholders?

This distinction is at the heart of design. Because “adding interaction” and “creating the interaction required for learning” are not the same thing. The first can become decoration. The second is behavioural rehearsal.

Seymour Papert argued that learning deepens when a person builds something externally; this is called the constructionism approach (Papert, Mindstorms, 1980). In corporate training, this does not have to mean “building a robot.” Sometimes an employee builds a sequence of decisions in a safe environment. Sometimes they solve a process. Sometimes they realise why the wrong option seemed appealing. These are also forms of building.

Asking the question “What if what I want were possible?” correctly

At first glance, this heading may sound a little like a fantasy of limitless possibility. Yet in good design, limitlessness does not mean doing everything. It means being able to think freely about the right thing.

An L&D team should be able to describe a training idea like this:

• “Let the employee see what information they skipped when they made a decision in a hurry.”
• “Let them compare how three different roles view the same event in this process.”
• “After the wrong choice, do not just write ‘wrong’; let the outcome change.”
• “In HSE training, let them notice the hazard in the environment instead of reading it in text.”
• “In GDPR training, let them distinguish the grey area rather than memorising the policy clause.”

Here, the focus is not the name of the component, but the learner’s experience.

This approach has a practical design framework:

Without answering these five questions, “interactive training” is often merely clickable training. A small but important difference.

The distance between waiting for an agency and testing an idea

The obstacle in front of a creative training idea is sometimes not imagination; it is the production chain. A brief is prepared. Feedback is awaited. The design is interpreted. A revision arrives. Someone says, “Make it a bit more game-like”; this sentence usually defines no technical requirement, yet it affects the entire schedule. Human language is a wonderful tool; “make it a bit more game-like” is a small piece of evidence.

In Nextrain, content can be created from existing documents, presentations, or a short brief; content can be structured, video can be turned into training, and questions and scenarios can be created. The ability to turn existing PowerPoint presentations into learning material is especially important: most organisations do not have to write knowledge from scratch; they need to make it learnable again.

Gökçen looks not only at “what a scene will explain” when writing scenarios, but also at which choice it will force the viewer to make. I think this distinction is valuable for content teams too. A well-written scene and an instructional scene are not the same thing. An instructional scene contains a decision set up so well that the learner cannot avoid it.

For this reason, agency dependency is not only a matter of cost or time. It is the distance between the moment a design idea first emerges and the moment it is tested. As that distance grows, the idea becomes domesticated. What begins as a “decision simulation inside a warehouse” may end up as a four-screen knowledge test. Not a tragedy, but a little sad-shaped.

Interaction is not movement; it is consequence

Having many clicks in a training course does not mean much learning is happening. Likewise, being short does not mean it is superficial. What should be measured is not only completion, but where people stop.

In Nextrain, events such as viewing, clicking, answering, and time spent can be tracked. This provides an important opportunity to feed learning design back into itself. For example:

• If people keep returning to the same scene, the content may be difficult or unclear.
• If incorrect answers to a question cluster around the same option, it is necessary to understand the appeal of that wrong option.
• If drop-off increases at a particular point in a video, the issue may not be attention; it may be pacing, context, or unnecessary information.
• If success is high but time spent at the critical decision point is very long, there may be a lack of confidence.

Completion shows that the door was passed through; learning shows what was done behind the door.

That is why data is not the report at the end of design, but the beginning of the next design. A learning experience does not end once it is published. It starts speaking for itself for the first time when real use begins.

As possibility grows, so does responsibility

The idea that “we can do everything” has a small risk: trying to do everything.

A good learning experience is not the one that is technologically most spectacular. It is the one that practises the behaviour most needed in the work context with the least unnecessary load. Cognitive load theory has said this for years: working memory is limited; design should reduce unnecessary load while preserving the load required for learning (Sweller, 1988).

For this reason, I suggest the following test for every idea:

• Does this interaction resemble the behaviour the learner will perform at work?
• Or does it merely make the screen look more active?
• When the learner makes a mistake, do they receive an explanation or see a consequence?
• Does this experience remind them of information, or does it make them practise decision-making?
• When the training is removed, what do we expect to change in work behaviour?

The last question is the hardest. Because an experience can be aesthetically good; whether it is necessary for learning is a separate matter.

The real freedom: not having to translate the idea into the language of the tool

L&D’s dream does not have to be “more features.” I think it is something more fundamental: not having to speak in tool language first when describing a learning problem.

Instead of “Let’s make a video and three questions”:

• “I want this person to see the risk before making the mistake.”
• “This team needs to distinguish the commercial impact of two options in front of the customer.”
• “This policy should not be memorised; it should be remembered at the moment of decision.”
• “By the end of this training, the employee should be able to say not ‘I know,’ but ‘I can do it.’”

These are better opening sentences. Because they describe the need, not the solution.

Having everything we want be possible may not be the right goal. Some ideas are expensive, some are unnecessary, and some are less instructional than a good two-minute scenario. But L&D’s design thinking should not begin at the limit of the screens currently available.

Imagine the experience first. Then define what that experience will make the learner do. Then decide which tools are truly necessary.

We can discuss the rest with systems. People still know best what other people need to learn. For me, that is both useful and almost touching as a division of labour.

Notes

1. Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. 1980.
2. Sweller, John. “Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning.” Cognitive Science, 1988.
3. Although the attribution of “Tell me and I forget…” to Franklin is widespread, a primary source is not definitive.