Chapter 4
The Action Mapping Process: Start with a Measurable Goal
The action mapping process begins with establishing a measurable business goal with your client and subject matter experts. This goal becomes the center of your action map and the North Star for your entire project.
A proper goal follows this format: "A measure we already use will increase/decrease number% by date as people DO something on the job." For example, "The TPS report rejection rate will decrease 20% by the end of the year as all clerks create accurate reports."
This approach differs dramatically from traditional training goals like "Salespeople will know all product features" or "Managers will understand the leave policy." These knowledge-focused goals miss the crucial "what's in it for the organization" element and lead to ineffective solutions.
Consider Bob, who initially wanted training so "salespeople will know all product features." Through discussion, his goal evolved to "Mega and monster widget sales will increase 5% by Q4 as salespeople identify the best widget for each customer." This measurable goal justified the expense and completely changed the training approach.
With the knowledge-focused goal, Bob would have created an information dump with fancy features but no behavior change. With the performance goal, he identified multiple solutions: changing sales reports to emphasize profit, adjusting commissions, reframing competition with rivals, and creating practice scenarios for asking good questions.
Creating a strong goal requires asking probing questions: What are you hoping to achieve? Is that something you normally measure? How much improvement do you need? When do you need to see results? Who specifically needs to change their behavior? What exactly do they need to do differently?
This goal-setting process positions you as a problem-solver rather than just a training provider, and creates a meaningful way to measure success. It demonstrates your commitment to solving the actual business problem, not just delivering information.
Chapter 5
From Goals to Actions: What People Need to DO
With your business goal established, the next step is identifying what people need to DO on the job to reach that goal. Instead of focusing on what people need to know, we identify observable behaviors that will drive results.
Actions describe observable on-the-job behaviors-things you can see someone do in their normal work. Unlike knowledge-based objectives like "identify techniques" or "list sources," true actions focus on real-world performance like "quickly extinguish a brush fire" or "recommend the appropriate widget based on customer needs."
This focus on actions grounds your project in reality rather than floating in a cloud of knowledge assumptions. Information doesn't solve problems; action does.
When brainstorming actions with stakeholders, you'll often hear knowledge statements rather than behaviors. When someone says "They need to understand the procedure," ask clarifying questions like "How can we tell if someone understands this?" or "What would someone who understands do differently?"
As you list actions, organize them hierarchically. High-level actions (like "Follow the X procedure") contain sub-actions ("In step 3, do Y"). This breakdown makes it easier to analyze performance gaps and design targeted activities.
After the initial brainstorm, focus on making broad actions more specific. For example, refine "Avoid the appearance of impropriety" to "When offered a gift valued at more than $100 by a potential client in Zekostan, reject the gift using culturally sensitive methods X, Y, and Z."
Actions are too broad if they're first drafts, few in number, not observable, take a long time to complete, can't be supported with job aids, or don't mention performance standards. Consider adding measurable standards, like changing "Write a clinic improvement plan" to "Write a clinic improvement plan of no more than six pages that achieves a score of 60 or less on the Global Readability Index."
Once you have specific, on-the-job behaviors in your map, work with your SME to identify the most important ones. Focus on actions that contribute most to reaching your goal, are commonly performed incorrectly, or have serious consequences if skipped.
Chapter 6
Uncovering the Real Problem: Why Aren't They Doing It?
This is the most critical step in action mapping-skipping it risks creating unnecessary training when other solutions might be more effective. For each high-priority action, investigate why people aren't performing it correctly or what might make it difficult.
The strategy is to keep asking "Why?" until you uncover the real reason behind performance problems. Consider this example: Store managers were falsifying inventory reports. The initial assumption was they needed ethics training, but persistent questioning revealed they were under pressure to show perfect inventory, lacked time for proper counting, and feared punishment for reporting discrepancies. The real solution wasn't ethics training but revised procedures and adjusted expectations.
When analyzing performance problems, examine four categories of potential barriers:
1. Environment: Poor tools, lack of management support, missing incentives, physical challenges (like noise), emotional challenges (dealing with upset people), organizational culture issues (information hoarding), and poor hiring decisions.
2. Skills: Mental or physical abilities that improve with practice. Ask whether people feel awkward performing tasks, need more fluency or speed, freeze in difficult situations, or would benefit from practice.
3. Knowledge: While most stakeholders blame knowledge gaps first, probe deeper to determine if people truly lack information or if other factors are at play. Often, "knowledge" problems can be solved with job aids rather than training.
4. Motivation: Be cautious about attributing problems to motivation, as apparent motivation issues usually stem from problems with knowledge, skills, or environment. Environmental factors are typically the biggest motivation killers: bad tools, no visibility of impact, punishment for excellence, lack of recognition, or toxic culture.
This analysis often reveals that multiple solutions are needed, including improvements to procedures or tools beyond just training. For example, when Grace requested software training for TPS record completion because 20% of records had errors, analysis revealed three different causes requiring three different solutions:
1. The XR code problem was environmental (difficult access to code sheets) and solved by adding a popup table in the software.
2. The name field issue was a knowledge problem requiring brief training on identifying Hispanic surnames.
3. The flagging decision was complex but only needed during record completion, so a decision table job aid solved it.
What started as a request for comprehensive training became a 10-minute activity plus two job aids-a more effective, efficient solution than creating an unnecessary 30-minute course that would waste 1,500 staff hours.
Chapter 7
Designing Practice Activities, Not Presentations
For actions that truly require training, the next step is brainstorming practice activities. Unlike traditional training where you'd immediately write the "course" and send content to the SME for correction, action mapping requires first creating activity ideas, determining their optimal format, and prototyping typical activities for testing.
A practice activity requires learners to apply information to make realistic job decisions, not just recall facts. Practice activities meet four key requirements:
1. They involve making decisions (not just showing knowledge)
2. They take place in a specific context with named people
3. They mirror the realism of the learner's actual job
4. They show consequences of decisions without preaching
For example, instead of asking "What's the most secure way to transfer data?" (an abstract knowledge check), a practice activity might ask "Tanya needs to bring salary data home to complete year-end reports. What should she do?" This creates meaningful discussion about security risks in a specific context.
The feedback approach dramatically affects learning. Traditional "telling" feedback that declares "Incorrect" and explains why treats learners like children who can't think independently. "Showing" feedback instead continues the scenario and reveals realistic consequences of choices, trusting learners to draw their own conclusions.
For example, in a sales scenario where the customer mentions a product running hot, traditional feedback might say "Incorrect. This response makes you seem defensive." Showing feedback would continue the scene: "Ravi frowns. 'I'm not surprised that your studies don't show any problems. Every company defends their products.'"
This "show, don't tell" approach extends to activity design-sending people into challenges before they're 100% prepared, letting them pull information when needed rather than pushing all information upfront. Research shows that "trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt."
Though practice activities require more effort to design than simple fact checks, they deliver superior results: they reflect real job demands, they're inherently more interesting, they inspire deeper thought and discussion, they improve memory by providing meaningful context, they help change behavior through relevant practice, and they respect adult learners by challenging them with meaningful decisions.
Chapter 8
Choosing the Right Format for Each Activity
After brainstorming practice activities, determine the best format for each activity rather than applying one format to the entire project. This means challenging assumptions about format choices and considering what will truly work best for learners.
Traditional training approaches often default to one-size-fits-all formats: everything becomes a two-day workshop or a 30-minute elearning module. Action mapping takes a different approach, considering the optimal delivery method for each activity based on learner needs and context.
Choose formats that match or simulate the real-life context where skills will be applied. Research shows people better remember and apply learning when learning and application contexts are similar.
For virtual team management, a live virtual classroom with role-playing works better than self-paced learning. For difficult conversations, in-person roleplaying with structured scripts beats online alternatives. Database tasks might work well with self-paced simulations, while ID checking benefits from face-to-face practice with actual IDs.
Also consider when learners would most benefit from each practice activity. Can you deliver the activity at the point of need-shortly before or even during task performance? For important but infrequent tasks, just-in-time practice is invaluable.
Consider spacing-delivering practice sessions days or weeks apart-which dramatically improves learning effectiveness but remains underutilized in corporate training. Unlike the typical "shot in the arm" one-day course, spaced learning helps skills become embedded through repeated retrieval practice.
After considering formats and timing for each activity, you'll likely conclude that packaging everything as one event isn't optimal. Instead, you might create a blend of job aids on the intranet, on-demand self-paced activities, spaced mini-scenarios over time, and perhaps a discussion webinar-or possibly no scheduled event at all.
Chapter 9
Creating Realistic, Challenging Scenarios
The heart of effective practice activities is creating realistic scenarios that challenge learners with decisions they'll face on the job. This process begins with interviewing your subject matter expert to gather the detailed, contextual information needed.
Rather than asking generic questions, encourage your SME to tell stories about specific incidents. Ask them to describe a memorable time when someone handled a situation particularly well or poorly. This storytelling approach yields rich details about the context, decision-making process, and consequences.
Having your SME perform the task while thinking aloud can be extremely effective. This reveals crucial mental models and rules of thumb that experts apply automatically. You can also videotape the expert performing the task and have them explain their thinking afterward, asking what a novice would have done differently.
When writing scenarios, follow four key rules:
1. Give people names or say "you" to create immediacy. "You're meeting with Ravi, a new customer" is more engaging than "A salesperson is meeting with a customer."
2. Show, don't tell, through dialogue. Using quotations makes the scenario feel more like a movie than a training exercise.
3. Include details, both relevant and distracting, to create complexity and challenge.
4. Delete unnecessary drama that distracts from the learning objective. Avoid stereotypes, excessive attribution words, exclamation points, and situations that don't occur regularly in typical workplaces.
For options, start by writing the most common mistake learners make, then add other incorrect choices, and finally the best option based on the desired behavior from your action map. Revise options to make them more subtle and challenging by focusing on the context that makes decisions difficult in real life.
For feedback, commit to showing consequences rather than simply telling learners what to think. This approach engages the brain, creates emotional involvement, and helps embed learning through what Julie Dirksen calls "desirable friction"-the messiness that helps information stick in long-term memory.
Chapter 10
From Analysis to Implementation: Making It Real
With your prototype activity tested and refined, it's time to outline the entire project, produce the remaining materials, and evaluate their effectiveness. Create a Project Charter-a high-level document describing what will be done, who will do it, and the timeline.
Unlike traditional 28-page design documents, your outline should be concise (as short as four pages for simple projects). This approach is better because clients prefer outlines, prototypes already demonstrate your plan, and shorter documents get approved faster.
Using your prototype as a model, write activities in small batches of about three at a time. This approach gets faster SME feedback, allows you to easily change direction if needed, helps discover when activities are unnecessary, and lets you produce activities as they're approved.
When budget is limited, prioritize analysis and design over visual "bling." Your job is solving performance problems, not making boring information interesting. Focus on challenging activities rather than shallow clickfests. Research shows irrelevant visuals ("eye candy") may make learners rate activities higher but actually reduce learning.
For assessment, create activities identical to practice activities but with feedback and "try again" options removed, along with any optional information learners should have memorized. This approach tests application rather than just knowledge.
Finally, evaluate both short-term and larger success of the project. While your ultimate evaluation is whether your business goal's metric improved, consider using Robert Brinkerhoff's Success Case Method for detailed feedback about what worked and what didn't.
This approach involves surveying participants after they've had time to implement changes, then interviewing both successful and unsuccessful respondents to identify factors that helped or hindered implementation. The resulting report goes beyond statistics to tell individual stories that demonstrate impact.
Chapter 11
The Transformative Power of Action Mapping
Action mapping fundamentally changes how organizations approach training and performance improvement. By focusing on business goals, observable behaviors, and the real barriers to performance, this approach transforms learning design from information dumps to targeted solutions that actually solve problems. This methodology represents a paradigm shift from traditional training approaches that often default to presenting information without clear connections to business outcomes.
The process begins by identifying specific, measurable business goals - for example, reducing customer complaints by 25% or increasing sales conversion rates by 15%. These concrete metrics provide a clear target for improvement efforts and allow organizations to measure the actual impact of their interventions. Rather than creating generic training programs, action mapping drives the development of focused solutions that directly address performance gaps.
While this approach may initially feel harder because it requires questioning assumptions, it ultimately leads to simpler solutions and more job satisfaction. Instead of blindly following directives like "create time-management training" or "convert these slides to elearning," action mapping asks deeper questions like "What's causing the invoicing backlog?" or "Why are widgets getting miswrangled?" These investigative questions often reveal that the real issues aren't related to knowledge gaps at all, but rather to process inefficiencies, unclear expectations, or inadequate tools.
The transformation extends beyond just creating better training materials. It positions learning professionals as strategic performance consultants who help organizations solve meaningful problems. For instance, when addressing a customer service issue, action mapping might reveal that the problem isn't lack of product knowledge, but rather a cumbersome software interface that slows down response times. This insight leads to different solutions than traditional training would provide.
Action mapping respects adult learners by challenging them with realistic decisions rather than boring them with information they may already know. Instead of presenting theoretical concepts, learners engage with scenario-based activities that mirror real-world challenges they face on the job. For example, rather than reviewing policies about handling difficult customers, learners might practice making decisions in simulated customer interactions, receiving immediate feedback on their choices.
As Cathy Moore writes, "The most valuable service you can provide is helping people perform better on the job with measurable results, not just creating what was initially requested." This approach has demonstrated success across various industries - from reducing error rates in manufacturing to improving sales performance in retail environments. By adopting the action mapping approach, organizations can systematically transform their learning and development efforts, focusing on outcomes rather than outputs, and creating meaningful change one performance problem at a time.
The implementation of action mapping often leads to unexpected benefits, such as improved collaboration between departments, clearer communication of expectations, and more efficient use of training resources. Organizations that embrace this methodology typically find they create less traditional training content but achieve better results, as their solutions are more targeted and effective.
