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 had 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 had been trained to do. I built a spreadsheet. A big one. Learning objectives mapped to content modules, aligned to assessments, 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 is not a word I use lightly, but it is the honest one. Something about the process felt wrong in a way I could not 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 had 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 were not being treated as adults with experiences, concerns, and judgment. They were being treated as units to be processed.

It took me a while to find language for what was bothering me. 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 is 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 are 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. He breaks things. The consequences are violent and immediate.

Vonnegut is not 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 does not let the reader off the hook. Throughout the book, he keeps pointing out that Dwayne’s worldview, the one that treats people as machines, is not 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 am 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. That if you identify the right objectives, sequence the right content, select the right delivery methods, and measure the right outcomes, you will 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 is not 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 is not a problem unique to any single model. 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 is 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. The feelings become variables to be managed rather than realities to be respected.

I do not think most instructional designers or change managers are doing this cynically. I certainly was not when I built that spreadsheet. The models give us something to hold onto, especially early in our careers when we are trying to establish credibility and demonstrate competence. Having a systematic process feels professional. It feels rigorous. And in many cases, it does produce functional results. The training gets built, the content gets delivered, the boxes get checked.

But functional is not the same as good. And the gap between those two things is exactly what Vonnegut is writing about.

The Unwavering Band of Light

There is 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 is 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 cannot be reduced to chemistry or mechanics or function. It is the awareness itself. Everything else about a person, their body, their behavior, their role in the economy, is “machinery.” But that band of light is not machinery. It is what makes a person a person and not a thing.

It is 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 is not whether we need structure, process, or systematic thinking in instructional design. We do. The question is whether the people at the center of our designs ever get treated as something more than the machinery. Whether there is room in our models for the band of light.

What It Would Mean to Design Differently

When I think back to that train-the-trainer project, what bothers me is not that I used a structured approach. It is 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. No acknowledgment that these were experienced adults who might have something to teach me about the context I was designing for. I had built a pipeline, and my job was to move them through it.

What I wish I had done instead was much simpler and much harder. I wish I had 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 had tried before. What they thought these students actually needed. And then built the support around what emerged from that conversation rather than from my spreadsheet.

That approach is messier. It is less impressive in a proposal document. It does not 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 do not 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. To pay attention to the moment when the spreadsheet stops serving the human and the human starts serving the spreadsheet. And to take 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 did not know what to do with it. I am 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.