ADDIE is not the enemy. Pretending you're still doing ADDIE is.
There’s a popular story in instructional design that goes: “we modernized from ADDIE to SAM/Agile, and quality went up.” I told that story myself at VMware. It’s mostly false.
The truth is more uncomfortable: we weren’t doing ADDIE before, and we weren’t doing SAM after. We were doing process theater in two different costumes.
What process theater looks like
ADDIE has five phases. SAM has rapid iterative cycles. Agile has sprints and standups. All three describe a discipline. None of them are the discipline itself.
Process theater is what happens when you produce the artifacts the process calls for but the discipline behind those artifacts has rotted away. The documents exist. The meetings happen. The decisions don’t get made — or get made anyway, off the record, by whoever has time to do it.
Three signs you’re doing process theater:
- Docs that no one reads. You produce an Analysis report in phase one because ADDIE calls for it. Nobody on the build team opens it. They go talk to the SMEs themselves because the report was assembled to satisfy a milestone, not to inform design.
- Milestones that always slip but never trigger reflection. Phase Three was supposed to be done by the 12th. It’s the 28th. You move the date. Nobody asks why. Next phase: same thing.
- Retrospectives that surface the same issues every quarter. “We need to get SMEs engaged earlier.” “We need more buffer before final review.” Same retro, three quarters in a row.
When this is happening, switching to SAM won’t help. You’ll do SAM theater. Which looks like: standups where nobody says what they’re stuck on, sprint reviews where nothing is reviewed, and burn-down charts that lie by Wednesday.
What actually changed at VMware
The shift that helped was not ADDIE → SAM. It was process theater → process honesty.
Three specific things:
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The Analysis report became a 30-minute meeting transcript. Nobody was reading the report. So we stopped writing it. We replaced it with a structured kickoff conversation, captured live, distributed within the hour. Same purpose, served better.
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Slipped milestones triggered a 15-minute root-cause review. Not “what’s our excuse.” Not “let’s update the plan.” A real conversation about what we knew on day one that we ignored. Sometimes the answer was “we knew the SME was going on PTO and we built around it anyway.” Knowing that, we stopped building around known SME absences.
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The work-in-progress became visible. Instead of “we’ll show you in Phase Four,” we showed half-built modules in week two. Stakeholders saw the design evolving. They corrected course early. The work product was the conversation.
That’s the actual move. ADDIE and SAM are both fine when the discipline is alive underneath them. They’re both useless when the discipline is dead.
The trap
SAM, Agile, and any future framework can become their own theater. The trap is the same: the artifacts exist, the meetings happen, the discipline is gone.
The way out is the same too. Stop producing artifacts nobody uses. Make slipped commitments cost something. Show the work in progress. If you find that uncomfortable, that’s the signal you needed.