What My Colonoscopy Taught Me About Instructional Design
Yesterday was my third colonoscopy. I want that out of the way early, because it matters to the story — three times through this exact process, and it never once occurred to me that I was watching an ADDIE project play out in real time. Not until I was home eating my first meal in nearly 48 hours yesterday afternoon.
Let me explain.
The initial consult in the doctor's office, where we discussed my symptoms and agreed to performing the colonoscopy, is effectively the initial kickoff meeting with a potential client. Nothing happens yet. Nothing's built yet. It's just two people agreeing on what the project actually is before either of them commits to anything. Skip this meeting, or rush it, and everything downstream gets worse. Every ID who's ever built a course without a real kickoff already knows exactly where this is going.
Then comes the analysis phase, and if you've ever done a real needs analysis, you already know it's the worst part of the job. Everyone wants to skip straight to building. Nobody wants to sit in the discomfort of figuring out what's actually wrong before they start designing a solution. The prep for a colonoscopy is that discomfort made extremely, unambiguously literal. You are handed instructions. Specific instructions. Follow them exactly, in order, on schedule, or the data's no good and you're doing this again. And then you spend the next several hours doing what I can only describe as a series of increasingly urgent data-collection runs to the bathroom, each one somehow both identical to and worse than the last, until at some point you stop asking "am I done yet" and start asking "was I ever going to be done, or is this just the process now." That's every SME interview I've ever sat through, if I'm honest. You ask the same question four different ways because the first three answers didn't actually tell you anything. You think you're finished. You are not finished. Ask again.
Eventually — and only eventually — everything clears up. And I mean that in every sense the word offers. The analysis is done. The information's clean. You know what you're working with. You're ready to build.
I knew the colonoscopy itself was a relatively quick process, but I didn't know how quick the entire thing actually is. I was put under at 10:04 and woken up at 10:36. Thirty-two minutes, and I experienced approximately none of them. The scary part was never in the operating room. It was always the at-home prep. Likewise, the scary part is never working in PowerPoint or Storyline — it's always the analysis.
I think about how often I've watched that same pattern play out in a project that had nothing to do with a hospital. The build gets treated like the hard part, the part that needs the schedule padding, the part everyone braces for — when really, if the kickoff was honest and the analysis was actually finished instead of just declared finished, the build is the easy afternoon. The nurses prepping the room, running through checks, making sure everything's positioned right before the doctor ever walks in — that's your peer reviewers and your graphic designers, quietly doing the work that makes the actual event look effortless. The front desk scheduling everything, sending the reminders, making sure the right people show up on the right day with the right paperwork — that's your training coordinators and your LMS admins, and nothing happens without them either, even though nobody remembers to thank them afterward.
Three times through this exact process, and it took the third one to notice the pattern. Which either means I'm a slow learner, or it means some lessons only show up once you've sat with the discomfort long enough to actually recognize it. Possibly both.