Toral Vaughan
© Toral Vaughan 2025

Part 1: Scope

How I focus:

In a world of shrinking budgets, tighter deadlines, and increasing organisational complexity, learning and enablement teams are under pressure to deliver more – and faster.


That’s why I work with a streamlined approach that blends the agility of the ADDIE methodology with the modularity of ABC Learning Design framework. It’s built for pace, clarity, and alignment – helping teams cut through the noise and focus on what really matters.


This process starts by engaging with senior stakeholders to understand strategic priorities and uncover where learning can drive real business impact. From there, it zooms in on the user – surfacing needs, friction points, and behavioural gaps.


By connecting user experience with business value early on, the rest of the process becomes more targeted, efficient, and measurable.


In practical terms, we start with determining what the business and performance goals are.

Business Goal: What is the knowledge, skill or behavioural gap that needs to be addressed?

Performance Goal: What do the learners need to DO in order to meet the business goal?

Example: “40% of leads from our website are lost!"

A Product Marketing Team member came to me with this alarming statement. What could we do to solve this problem?


We kicked off by filling in a fresh scoping document (see the image on the right). I use this as a guide – not a checklist. It’s a tool to start the Discovery process, a methodology adapted from sales enablement but grounded in learning and performance theory – asking not just what content is needed, but what problem are we trying to solve, who are we solving it for, and how success will be measured.


Adapting this mindset into my work helps me surface things we wouldn’t have caught at first glance – like unclear expectations, overlooked blockers, or a gap between what’s being asked and what’s actually needed. Those insights can completely shift the direction of the project.

From this Discovery work (see the image on the left), it became clear that this is a high-impact, low-effort learning initiative:


- It’s a one-off intervention, not part of our evergreen learning curriculum

- We’re addressing a knowledge gap, not a skills gap

- The target audience is SDRs and Midmarket AEs

- We’ve got a clear, measurable outcome with a defined timeline

- Execs are aligned on the priority

- We identified new stakeholders (Rev Ops) to add to the RACI


I was able to shape clear business (hit our projected sales targets) and performance (ensure sales teams assess and follow up on all website leads within 1 week of enquiry) goals – grounded in what the organisation needs and what the learners need to do.


From here, I could start shaping learning objectives and choosing modalities – which I’ll cover next in Part 2: Design & Develop.

Note:

I’ve also set up and governed systems that formalise topic intake, prioritisation, development and release. However, this portfolio focuses on the design processes, not the operational.


PS – I’m tactically minded and genuinely enjoy talking ops. If that’s your thing too, let’s connect and swap ideas.