Working With Subject-Matter Experts Without Endless Review Cycles

The hardest part of most course projects is not building the course. It is getting accurate content out of the person who knows the subject, in a form you can use, before they get pulled onto something else.

Why do review cycles spiral?

Because "have a look at this and let me know what you think" is an invitation with no boundaries. It asks the expert to evaluate everything at once — accuracy, wording, structure, tone, scope — and people respond to unbounded requests by commenting on whatever they notice, which is usually the wording.

You then get a round of changes about commas, ship a revision, and only in the third round does someone mention that the whole approvals section describes a process that changed in March.

What should I ask them for instead?

One thing per round, in this order:

• Round one: is this the right scope? Send an outline, not a draft. Ask only whether anything essential is missing and anything included does not belong. Fifteen minutes of their time.
• Round two: is this accurate? Send the draft and ask them to mark only things that are wrong or dangerously incomplete. Explicitly tell them to ignore wording.
• Round three: sign-off. Send the finished course and ask a yes-or-no question.

Naming the question for each round is what stops the scope creeping backwards. It also makes the ask smaller, which is the difference between a reply this week and a reply next month.

How do I get the content out of their head in the first place?

Do not ask them to write it. Experts are usually bad at writing training for beginners, not because they cannot write, but because they have forgotten what it is like not to know. What they produce tends to be either too dense or oddly patchy — thorough on the interesting parts, silent on the obvious ones.

Better approaches, in rough order of how well they work:

• Record a conversation. Interview them for forty minutes and work from the transcript. People explain far better than they write.
• Start from what already exists. Their procedure document, their training slides, the email they send new starters. Draft from that and have them correct it.
• Write it wrong on purpose. A draft with errors in it gets a far faster and more detailed response than a blank request. Experts cannot leave an inaccuracy alone.

That last one sounds like a trick and is really just an acknowledgement that reacting is easier than creating.

What about contradictory feedback from multiple experts?

Get it in one place and make the disagreement visible rather than mediating it privately. If two people give you conflicting accounts of a process, the honest position is that the organisation has not decided, and you cannot resolve that by picking one.

Put both versions in front of both people and ask which is correct. It feels awkward and it is much faster than three rounds of alternating rewrites, and it occasionally surfaces a genuine problem that has nothing to do with your course.

How do I handle "just add this too"?

Write it down and schedule it, rather than absorbing it. Scope added during review is how a two-week course becomes a two-month course, and it usually arrives as a small request attached to a legitimate correction.

A useful reply: "Happy to — is that more important than something already in scope, or should it go in version two?" Most of the time the honest answer is version two, and asking makes that explicit rather than leaving you to absorb it.

What should I give them to make review easy?

A shareable link to the actual course rather than a document. Reviewing a Word file and imagining the course is harder than clicking through the real thing, and it produces comments about the document rather than the learning.

Give them a deadline with a reason attached, and tell them what happens if it passes. "I need this by Friday to hit the November rollout, and if I do not hear back I will assume it is accurate" is not a threat; it is the information they need to prioritise it.

The thing that helps most

Doing the first draft yourself. An expert asked to create feels a project landing on them. An expert asked to correct feels a small favour. The work is roughly the same for you, and the difference in response time is substantial.