This is something that plays out day-in-day-out in businesses everywhere. And something I've written about time and time again. You might think I’m referring to a boardroom battle that spills blood on the corporate carpet. But I’m not.

This is the struggle between the holder of knowledge and skills (usually an SME) and the person or team tasked with turning that knowledge and those skills into a piece of learning.

It’s fairly typical to find that SMEs want to stuff everything they can think of into the course. It's perfectly  natural. When you are an expert in a particular area you, understandably, think that you should provide newbies with as much information as possible.

In reality, this is rarely helpful. Learners generally need a well-crafted subset of that knowledge, not the whole lot. And if they do need the whole lot, it will surely need to be carefully broken down into manageable chunks.

With a bit of luck, the learning and development team or person will be able to push back and aim to focus on relevance for learners.

In the best situations, learning and development will have positioned themselves as the true learning experts and have no problems when asserting that they are the ones best placed to make the final decisions about the scope of a given course.

In the very worst cases, learning and development are effectively doormats, pushed around by the knowledge and skills holders, bending to their every whim and desire. They have truly become powerless order takers.

My experience working with a wide range of learning and development folk over a good few years now, is that most people find themselves somewhere in the middle on this issue. Not necessarily having total say but certainly able to push back against the worst excesses of SME overload.

If you typically don't have any control in the power struggle just described, you need to work on getting some of that control back.

If you are relatively new to working with SMEs and the whole analysis and planning piece that needs to go on in the early stages of an instructional design project, check out our on-demand webinar: How to embrace your inner instructional 'architect' for increased design success. 

You don't need to be a campaigner or activist to be passionate about something. We can all feel our pulse quicken, our emotions rise when we get chance to talk or write about a topic that engages us totally.

And it’s usually because either we know lots about this topic or something we are directly involved with in our working or private lives. Whatever this topic is, we can talk about it for hours without getting bored. We can tell anyone willing to listen about every last detail. In that sense, we are all subject matter experts in something.

And as learning and development professionals it's worth remembering our own passion for a particular subject matter when analysing and gathering someone else's subject matter expertise.

Aside from being more empathetic to a talkative SME sat in front of us, is there anything else we can do to make our time with them more productive? 

There are four areas it's worth considering when gathering content from SMEs. The greater the quantity of content you need to gather, the more you are likely to want to formalise the approaches below.

Ownership

Before any information gathering even happens, you need to take ownership of the process. This may involve becoming more assertive than normal: be quite specific about how you want the process to unfold, including the number of meetings you'll need, how long each meeting should be and how much time you'll need between meetings for reviewing and feedback.

Planning

Tempting as it might be to go into your early meetings knowing nothing, better to do research to familiarise yourself with the subject matter area. Spend time creating a basic project plan. Clearly define your and their roles in the whole process. Formally identify the risks of not getting the required information in a timely fashion and communicate this to the project sponsor.

Connecting

Your initial research can pay dividends once you start interacting with your SME. Exhibiting some knowledge of his/her topic can help build rapport and, more important, establish your credibility. Earn trust by emphasising the confidentiality of your information gathering sessions and the promise of a review of content before making it more widely available.

As the content gathering progresses, aim to establish points of shared interest both within the subject matter area and outside. Most people appreciate a little interest in their life outside work.

Focusing

Set an agenda in advance of the meeting clearly stating goals and expectations.

During your content gathering sessions, regularly paraphrase, clarify and summarise what you have covered; use closed questioning techniques if your SME has a tendency to go off on tangents. After the session, collate the content into a structured document you can share with the SME for review and feedback.

It's easy to dismiss some of the subject matter experts we deal with in our professional capacity as out of control windbags who want to bore us and our learners with every last detail of their knowledge.

That may be true. But let's not forget, given the right topic and the opportunity, many of us can happily do the same.

So with a bit empathy and some detailed preparation and worked before, during and after your content gathering, the analysis phase of your project need not be an out of control nightmare.

Before you start working on your next project, check out our Analysis and Planning modules for help on dealing with subject matter experts and their content.