Mirjam Neelen & Paul A. Kirschner

Before we dive in here, we need to give some credit to the person who inspired our approach and the style of this blog: Japke-D Bouma (Twitter handle: @japked). She’s a Dutch journalist who writes a regular column in NRC (a Dutch newspaper) on baffling jargon, work, and career. We’re both fans of her!

Stakeholders[1]! The people we need, love, sometimes love to hate, and who sometimes also drive us bonkers. We want to please them, make them happy, have them love us. We want to go out of our way to delight them. After all, they’re our customers. But man! They can sometimes really get in the way when it comes to actually designing useful learning experiences[2] so that people actually can do their jobs better.

Of course, we don’t mean their reality – urgency, budget, limited resources, data restrictions…