Will Thalheimer offers The Magic Question for Learning and Instructional Design:

“What do learners need to be able to do, and in what situations do they need to do those things?�

This resembles my own post, From Training to Performance in One Question. One expansion Will makes that I like is the need to identify not only instructional objectives but performance situations.

That might seem obvious, but not if you’ve suffered through typical subject-matter-focused training. All too often, corporate training assumes there’s a body of knowledge, and seemed determined to load that entire body onto yours.

Talking about “soft skills training,” Joe Harless would ask a client, “effective communications for what?” This moved the discussion from some Platonic sender-message-receiver folderol to an actual workplace issue, like how supervisors can give effective feedback about performance.