Early in my career as an instructional designer, I took on a project that should have felt like meaningful work. We were building a train-the-trainer program for people who would be supporting at-risk students. The mission was clear, the need was real, and I’d just finished my master’s program with a head full of instructional design models and frameworks ready to be applied.
So I did what I’d been trained to do and built a spreadsheet, a big one, with learning objectives mapped to content modules, aligned to assessments, and connected to delivery formats. It was thorough, organized, and professionally competent. The person I was working with was impressed, and I felt grossed out.
That isn’t a word I use lightly, but it’s the honest one. Something about the process felt wrong in a way I couldn’t fully articulate at the time. I was designing a system to prepare real human beings to work with vulnerable young people, and the tool I’d built to do it looked like an installation manual. Watch this module. Complete this activity. Demonstrate this competency. Move to the next station. The people on the other end of the design weren’t being treated as adults with experiences, concerns, and judgment so much as units to be processed.
It took me a while to find language for what was bothering me, and eventually I found some of it in a novel.
“Dwayne Was A Bad Chemical”
Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions is, on its surface, a chaotic book. It’s full of crude drawings, digressions, recursive jokes, and a plot that barely holds together. But underneath all of that, Vonnegut is wrestling with a single, devastating question: what happens when we treat people like machines?
The novel’s central disaster unfolds when Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer in Midland City, reads a science fiction story by Kilgore Trout. The story tells its reader that they’re the only creature in the universe with free will, and everyone else is a robot, a machine put there for the reader’s purposes. Dwayne, already fragile, takes the story literally and begins treating everyone around him accordingly. He hurts people and breaks things, and the consequences are violent and immediate.
Vonnegut isn’t being subtle. The Kilgore Trout story is a thought experiment about what happens when you strip away the assumption that other people have inner lives, agency, and value independent of what they can do for you. When you reduce people to their function, to their role in your system, the results are destructive, maybe not always as dramatically as Dwayne’s rampage, but destructive nonetheless.
What makes this more than a cautionary tale is that Vonnegut doesn’t let the reader off the hook. Throughout the book, he keeps pointing out that Dwayne’s worldview, the one that treats people as machines, isn’t actually that different from how American society already operates. People are described by their economic function, their productivity, their utility. The novel is full of characters who have already been reduced to their roles long before Dwayne reads the Trout story.
The Spreadsheet and the System
I think about that dynamic when I look at how we teach and practice instructional design. The models and frameworks we learn, and I’m not singling out any particular one because this is true across the board, tend to share a common structural assumption: that learning can be engineered. If you identify the right objectives, sequence the right content, select the right delivery methods, and measure the right outcomes, the assumption goes, you’ll produce the desired result in the learner.
The language gives it away. We talk about “delivering” instruction as if it were a package. We “deploy” training. We design “interventions.” We measure “performance gaps” and build systems to close them. The learner in this framework isn’t a person with a complicated inner life, prior experiences, legitimate concerns, and their own capacity for judgment. The learner is a gap to be closed, a behavior to be shaped, an output to be produced.
This isn’t a problem unique to any single model, in that it runs through the entire tradition. Even frameworks that were developed with genuinely humanistic intentions tend to get applied mechanistically. Change management theory is a good example. William Bridges wrote about transitions as deeply internal, personal processes that people navigate at their own pace, involving real feelings of loss, confusion, and gradual reorientation. That’s a fundamentally human insight. But watch how it gets applied in practice: “People will be in the neutral zone during weeks three through six, so we need to schedule these specific communications and support activities during that window to move them through to the new beginning phase.” The internal human experience becomes a stage in a project plan, and the feelings become variables to be managed rather than realities to be respected.
I don’t think most instructional designers or change managers are doing this cynically. I certainly wasn’t when I built that spreadsheet. The models give us something to hold onto, especially early in our careers when we’re trying to establish credibility and demonstrate competence. Having a systematic process feels professional and rigorous, and in many cases it does produce functional results: the training gets built, the content gets delivered, the boxes get checked.
But functional isn’t the same as good, and the gap between those two things is exactly what Vonnegut is writing about.
The Unwavering Band of Light
There’s a moment in Breakfast of Champions that Vonnegut himself later called the emotional heart of the book. Rabo Karabekian, an abstract expressionist painter, has brought a painting to Midland City that consists of a single vertical stripe of luminous color on a plain background. The locals hate it. They think it’s a scam, a joke at their expense.
Then Karabekian explains what the painting represents. The stripe, he says, is the unwavering band of light that is the core of every animal, the sacred part that can’t be reduced to chemistry or mechanics or function. It’s the awareness itself. Everything else about a person, their body, their behavior, their role in the economy, is “machinery.” But that band of light isn’t machinery. It’s what makes a person a person and not a thing.
It’s a strange, beautiful moment in a book that has spent hundreds of pages cataloging all the ways people get treated like things. And I think it offers something genuinely useful for how we think about designing learning experiences.
The question isn’t whether we need structure, process, or systematic thinking in instructional design, since we do. The question is whether the people at the center of our designs ever get treated as something more than the machinery, and whether there’s room in our models for the band of light.
What would it mean to design differently?
When I think back to that train-the-trainer project, what bothers me isn’t that I used a structured approach but that the structure became the entire thing. There was no space in my design for the trainers to come in and talk about their concerns, no room for them to share what they already knew about working with at-risk students, and no acknowledgment that these were experienced adults who might have something to teach me about the context I was designing for. I’d built a pipeline, and my job was to move them through it.
What I wish I’d done instead was much simpler and much harder. I wish I’d designed something that started with listening, that brought those trainers into a room, or onto a call, and asked them what they were worried about, what they’d tried before, and what they thought these students actually needed. Then I’d have built the support around what emerged from that conversation rather than from my spreadsheet.
That approach is messier and less impressive in a proposal document, and it doesn’t map as cleanly to learning objectives or produce as satisfying a deliverables matrix. But it treats people like people. It assumes they have that band of light, that irreducible awareness and agency, that no amount of systematic design can account for if you don’t start by acknowledging it exists.
This is, I think, the challenge that Vonnegut keeps putting in front of us: not to abandon systems entirely, but to notice when our systems have started treating people as parts. It means paying attention to the moment when the spreadsheet stops serving the human and the human starts serving the spreadsheet, and taking seriously the discomfort that shows up when something about the process feels wrong, even when the process looks right on paper.
I felt that discomfort early in my career, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I’m still figuring it out. But I have at least learned to trust that the feeling means something, and that a well-organized plan is not automatically a good one just because it is well-organized.
If you are working in instructional design or learning experience design and you have felt something similar, that quiet unease when a project is technically sound but somehow hollow, I would be curious to hear about it. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and you can find more writing along these lines at bradylicht.com.
