The Curse of Knowledge: Why SMEs and Instructional Designers Need Each Other
- Hoda Izadnia
- 12 hours ago
- 8 min read
Subject matter experts are essential to good training. They know the systems, procedures, regulations, risks, exceptions, and realities of the work.
But there is a paradox.
The more expertise someone develops, the harder it can become to remember what it was like not to know.
Connections feel obvious. Terminology feels familiar. Intermediate steps disappear. Decisions that once required conscious thought become automatic.
This is known as the curse of knowledge: once we know something, it becomes difficult to accurately imagine the perspective of someone who does not.
In training, that matters. Because knowing a subject deeply and knowing how to help someone else learn it are not the same expertise.
That is why the strongest training does not come from replacing the SME with an instructional designer or expecting the instructional designer to work without the SME.
It comes from combining both.
Expertise changes what looks obvious
Imagine an experienced technician explaining a troubleshooting procedure:
“Check the indications, confirm the system status, and isolate the fault.”
To another experienced technician, that may be perfectly clear.
To a new employee, it may raise several questions.
Which indications?
What does normal look like?
Which check comes first?
Which readings matter?
What signals a problem?
What exactly does “isolate” require?
The SME may not intentionally leave these things out. They may no longer see them as separate pieces of knowledge. Expertise compresses information. What a novice experiences as ten individual observations and decisions may feel like one familiar pattern to an expert.
Research on expertise has identified a related phenomenon often described as expert blind spot: greater subject knowledge does not necessarily make someone better at predicting what will be difficult for a novice.
This does not make SMEs poor contributors to training. Quite the opposite. Their expertise is indispensable. But it does mean that expertise needs another perspective beside it.
The instructional designer provides that second perspective
One of the most valuable things an instructional designer brings to an SME conversation is not another answer.
It is another question.
“What does that mean?”
“What would the learner actually see?”
“How would they know something is wrong?”
“What happens if they make the wrong decision?”
“Do they need to remember this, or know where to find it?”
“What does a beginner need to understand before we teach this?”
I wrote previously about why I often say “I don’t understand” in SME meetings. It is not because understanding the subject is unimportant. It is because pretending to understand serves no one.
If something is unclear to the instructional designer who is actively investigating the content, there is a good chance it will be unclear to the learner too.
Those questions make hidden expertise visible.
They expose assumptions, skipped steps, prerequisite knowledge, decision points, exceptions, and consequences that may never appear in the original SME material.
The SME knows the work.
The instructional designer helps uncover what someone else needs in order to learn that work.
Training should not start with content
A common training request begins like this:
“We need training on this procedure.”
“We need a course about this system.”
“Employees need to understand this regulation.”
The temptation is to immediately ask the SME for existing presentations, manuals, procedures, and reference documents.
But the first question should come earlier:
What problem are we trying to solve?
What is happening now?
What should be happening instead?
What is causing the gap?
Do employees lack knowledge?
Do they lack practice?
Is the procedure unclear?
Is the system difficult to use?
Are supervisors reinforcing a shortcut?
Are employees being asked to remember information that should be available as a job aid?
Not every performance problem is a training problem.
This is why needs analysis is not an optional step before “real development.” It is part of the real work.
An SME understands the subject.
An instructional designer investigates the gap between current and required performance.
Without that investigation, an organization can end up with technically accurate training that solves the wrong problem.
Knowing the subject is not the same as knowing the learner
The next question is equally important:
Who needs this training?
Not simply their job title.
What do they already know?
What do they do in their actual work?
How experienced are they?
What terminology is familiar to them?
Where do they struggle?
What misconceptions do they have?
What decisions are they expected to make independently?
The same technical subject may require completely different training for different populations.
A new employee may need foundational concepts.
An experienced employee transitioning to a new system may mainly need to understand what has changed.
A supervisor may need to interpret information and make decisions.
A maintenance specialist may need to troubleshoot failures in considerable depth.
Same subject. Different knowledge gaps. Different objectives. Different training.
Without understanding the target population, the SME's own knowledge can unintentionally become the reference point.
The question becomes:
“What should I tell them about this?”
Instructional design asks a better question:
“What does this particular group need to be able to do?”
That change in question changes the course.
Learning objectives create boundaries
SMEs usually know far more than learners need at one particular stage of development.
They know exceptions.
They know unusual cases.
They know the history behind procedures.
They know rare failures.
They know details that became important because of something that happened years ago.
Much of that knowledge is valuable.
But valuable does not automatically mean necessary in this training.
This is where learning objectives provide discipline.
If learners must identify warning indications, the content should prepare them to identify those indications.
If they must perform a safety-critical procedure, explaining the steps on slides is not sufficient. They need appropriate practice and an opportunity to demonstrate the required performance.
If they only need to recognize when a problem should be escalated, advanced diagnosis may not belong in their initial training.
A clear objective forces useful questions:
What does the learner need to do?
Under what conditions?
How well?
What knowledge supports that performance?
How will we know they can do it?
Without objectives, “important information” has a habit of becoming “required content.”
And the course grows. Not necessarily because learners need more. Because the expert knows more.
Content curation requires instructional judgment
One of the hardest conversations with an SME can begin with four words:
“They should know this.”
Perhaps they should.
But that statement should start the conversation, not end it.
Why do they need it?
When will they use it?
What happens if they do not know it?
Does it support a learning objective?
Is it prerequisite knowledge?
Would it be better provided as a reference or job aid?
Do they need it now, or after gaining more experience?
This is where collaboration between the SME and instructional designer becomes especially valuable.
The SME protects against oversimplification.
The instructional designer protects against unnecessary overload.
The SME knows which technical details cannot safely be removed.
The instructional designer examines when learners need those details, how they should encounter them, and what they need first to make sense of them.
Good content curation is therefore not simply shortening SME material.
It is making deliberate decisions about what supports the required performance.
Experts and novices do not see the same thing
A screen that looks simple to an expert may be overwhelming to a beginner.
The expert sees three meaningful indicators.
The novice sees twenty unfamiliar items.
The expert sees a pattern.
The novice sees individual pieces.
The expert reads one line in a procedure and mentally fills in several actions from experience.
The novice sees only the line that was written.
That difference matters because working memory is limited, particularly when learners are dealing with unfamiliar and complex information.
Novices may need information sequenced differently.
They may need worked examples.
They may need guided practice before independent practice.
They may need comparisons between correct and incorrect decisions.
They may need irrelevant complexity removed until foundational knowledge develops.
Again, both roles matter.
The SME provides the reality of the work.
The instructional designer creates a path through that reality that the learner can actually follow.
An SME is not automatically a trainer or an instructional designer
I have written before about another common assumption in organizations: someone is excellent at their job, therefore they are asked to train others.
But subject matter expertise does not automatically create training expertise.
Knowing how to perform a job and knowing how to help someone else develop that capability require different skills.
The same distinction applies to instructional design.
An SME can know exactly what correct performance looks like without being trained to conduct a needs analysis, analyze a target population, identify knowledge gaps, write learning objectives, structure learning, curate content, design meaningful practice, or align assessment with performance.
Expecting one person to provide the subject expertise and perform all of those instructional functions assumes that expertise in one area automatically transfers to another.
It does not.
Of course, some SMEs become excellent trainers and designers. They may deliberately develop those skills through experience, education, feedback, and practice.
But then they have developed additional expertise.
That is different from assuming the expertise came automatically with knowing the subject.
The instructional designer should not enter after the content is finished
Sometimes the instructional designer is brought in late.
The SME has already decided what learners need.
The content has been selected.
The sequence has been established.
The PowerPoint contains 120 slides.
Then the request arrives:
“Can you make this into training?”
At that point, many instructional decisions have already been made, whether anyone called them instructional decisions or not.
Someone decided what the problem was.
Someone assumed what learners knew.
Someone chose what information mattered.
Someone decided what could be left out.
Someone determined the sequence.
If those decisions were made solely from the expert's perspective, the curse of knowledge may already be built into the course.
The instructional designer's contribution should therefore begin before content development.
With analysis.
With questions.
With learning objectives.
With conversations about the learners and their work.
Not after all of those decisions have effectively been made.
The best collaboration is not a handoff
It is tempting to divide the work neatly:
The SME provides the content.
The instructional designer builds the course.
But strong SME–ID collaboration is not a content handoff.
It is an ongoing conversation.
The SME might say:
“This detail is critical.”
The instructional designer asks:
“For which learners? What do they need to do with it?”
The instructional designer might suggest simplifying an explanation.
The SME explains:
“If we simplify it that far, we create a dangerous misconception.”
The SME might want to teach an entire system.
The instructional designer identifies that this population only operates two parts of it.
The instructional designer proposes a practice scenario.
The SME makes it realistic.
The SME identifies the mistakes that matter.
The instructional designer builds those mistakes into the practice and assessment.
That back-and-forth is not inefficiency.
It is where much of the quality comes from.
Two forms of expertise, one learning problem
The SME and instructional designer answer different questions.
The SME asks:
Is this technically correct?
The instructional designer asks:
Will this help these learners achieve the required performance?
The SME understands the subject, the workplace reality, the standards, the exceptions, and the consequences.
The instructional designer understands the learners, the performance gap, the learning objectives, the cognitive demands, the sequence, the practice, and the assessment.
Neither perspective is enough by itself.
Instructional design without strong SME involvement risks producing learning that is well structured but technically shallow, inaccurate, or disconnected from the real work.
SME expertise without instructional design risks producing training that is accurate but overloaded, poorly targeted, incorrectly sequenced, or disconnected from learner performance.
The combination is what makes the difference.
Expertise needs translation
The curse of knowledge is not a criticism of SMEs.
It is one of the consequences of becoming highly competent.
Experts notice patterns quickly.
They make connections automatically.
They no longer consciously process every step.
Organizations need that depth of knowledge.
Learners need it too.
But learners need more than access to an expert's knowledge.
They need that knowledge analyzed, questioned, curated, structured, sequenced, practiced, and connected to the performance expected from them.
That is the instructional designer's job.
The SME knows the territory in detail.
The instructional designer needs to understand where the learner is starting, where they need to go, what they need along the way, and where they are likely to get lost.
One brings the depth of the subject.
The other brings the discipline of learning design.
The strongest training happens when neither is asked to replace the other.
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