TL;DR – If you are a business owner and don’t have an ID in your strategy meetings, you’re making a mistake.
It has never been more evident people in the role of Instructional Designer know more about your business than you do. And if you aren’t including them in your strategy sessions, you’re not getting the whole picture with what’s going on.
These folks hold a whole set of skills that when given the correct setting can reveal aspects of your business significantly impacting employee engagement and your bottom line.
I’d like to make the case why they should be included as a vital role within every business. Now here’s the rest of the article:
A Different Kind of Intelligence
When people hear “business intelligence,” they usually think of charts and graphs, and folks nodding at data scientists in meetings. But there’s another kind of intelligence hiding in plain sight; someone in a cozy sweater, armed with sticky notes and curiosity, asking questions like “Why does no one read the quarterly compliance updates?” Instructional Designers (IDs) are often tucked into HR or L&D departments, building training programs and onboarding courses. But the smartest organizations are starting to realize these folks don’t just teach, they reveal your business’s operational reality.
IDs spend their days conducting process archaeology digging into how teams really work, what tools they actually use, where confusion lies, and why that expensive CRM feature never caught on. Before building any training, they act like internal ethnographers (a fancy word for someone who observes the way others do stuff), interviewing staff, shadowing workflows, and mapping what people “actually” know versus what they “need” to know. This organizational visibility makes IDs surprisingly powerful BI assets who can explain the human story behind the data.
Execs get Clarity, Managers get Direction, Employees Thrive
What makes IDs especially valuable is their ability to take complex subject-matter and convert it to meet their audience’s level of understanding. While data analysts track performance metrics, IDs explain why those numbers look the way they do. They know who’s struggling, why teams are improvising workarounds, and what knowledge gaps are quietly dragging down performance. They’re masters at packaging messy, human-centered insights into communication that actually sticks: executives get clarity, managers get actionable direction, and employees get resources that help them thrive.
This ability to translate complexity into clarity is exactly what transforms business intelligence from brightly-colored, expensive dashboards into insights that drive decisions.
The ROI becomes obvious when IDs are included early in strategic initiatives. Whether it’s a system rollout or customer experience revamp, organizations don’t just move faster, they avoid costly adoption failures and resistance altogether. IDs predict process breakdowns, anticipate user friction, and map cultural barriers before they derail your strategy. So if you’re wondering why adoption is low, turnover is high, or that new system isn’t delivering expected ROI, ask your Instructional Designer. They likely already know the answer (and probably documented the workaround).
You Already Have a Strategic Advantage
Forward-thinking companies are creating hybrid roles like Business Intelligence Learning Strategist, a mouthful, but giving IDs access to BI tools and invites to strategy meetings. You don’t need to overhaul, just bring them into the room and upskill if needed. They already handle the hard parts: curiosity, cross-functional analysis, and systems thinking. While your competitors try to figure out why their expensive new systems aren’t working, you’ll already know because your ID flagged the adoption barriers. The question isn’t whether your ID can add value to business intelligence, it’s how much longer you can afford to ignore the strategic intelligence sitting in your training department.
Let’s hear from you:
Are you already tapping into this, or just starting to see the opportunity? And if you still think of IDs as “just the training folks,” this is your sign, your next strategic advantage might be sitting a few Slack channels away, asking all the right questions.
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