Every eXACT project starts in the same place, and it is not with a storyboard or a script. It starts with a question. What is actually going on, what needs to change and how will we know it has worked?
These questions sit at the heart of eXplore, the first stage of our eXACT methodology. It is easy to treat this stage as a formality, something to get through quickly on the way to the more visible work of building a course. We take a different view. Get this stage wrong and everything that follows is built on shaky ground, no matter how polished the final course looks.
Starting with the real problem
A client brief tells you what someone thinks they need. It rarely tells you the full story. Maybe a compliance course exists already but staff are not retaining the content. Maybe a new system is being rolled out and nobody has thought through how different teams will actually use it day to day. Our job during eXplore is to dig past the brief and find out what is really happening.
This means asking questions that go beyond the obvious ones. Who are the learners, really, and what do they already know? What has been tried before, and why did it not work? What does success look like once this course is live? How will anyone know if it has worked?
What happens during eXplore
This stage tends to include a mix of the following activities.
- Stakeholder interviews to understand business goals and constraints
- Reviewing any existing content or materials
- Understanding the audience, including their context and prior knowledge
- Defining clear, measurable learning outcomes
- Agreeing the scope and approach for the project
None of this needs to take a long time, but it does need to be done properly. A rushed exploration stage tends to show up later as scope creep, misaligned expectations or a course that technically covers the content but does not actually solve the problem.
Why this stage matters so much
Learning outcomes written during eXplore become the measure for everything that follows. They shape what gets included in the storyboard, what interactions make sense, and what we test for at the end. Skip this step or rush it, and there is a real risk of building a course that ticks boxes without changing behaviour.
We have found that the time spent here pays for itself many times over. A clear brief means fewer revisions during development, a smoother sign off process, and a course that clients trust because they were involved in shaping it from the start.
eXplore is not the most visible part of what we do, but it is the part that makes everything else possible. Get it right, and the rest of the eXACT process becomes far more straightforward.
