Map It by Cathy Moore: Action Mapping Explained – A Summary

Most e-learning courses begin with content. A subject matter expert shares their knowledge, a designer formats it, and learners are expected to absorb it. Cathy Moore's Map It starts in a completely different place: with a measurable business goal. Everything else — including whether training is needed at all — follows from there.

Map It, published in 2017, formalizes Moore's action mapping approach that she'd been developing and writing about on her blog for years. It's short (around 200 pages), direct, and deliberately contrarian. If you've spent time in L&D watching well-intentioned courses fail to change behavior, the book will feel like it's naming something you already suspected.

#The problem action mapping solves

Moore identifies the central failure mode of organizational training bluntly: information dumps. Courses that present everything a learner might possibly need to know, organized around topics rather than around what people actually need to do. These courses optimize for content completeness, not for behavior change. They measure success by completion rates, not by whether anyone does anything differently afterward.

The result is training that people sit through, click through, and forget — while the underlying performance problem persists. Action mapping is built to prevent this.

#The 4-step process

#Step 1: Identify the business goal

The process begins with a concrete, measurable organizational goal — not a training objective. "Improve customer satisfaction scores by 15%" is a business goal. "Increase awareness of the customer service guidelines" is not. This distinction matters because it anchors all subsequent decisions in something the organization actually cares about.

Moore is direct about the resistance this step encounters. Stakeholders often arrive with a course in mind rather than a goal. Part of the instructional designer's job, as she frames it, is to conduct this diagnostic conversation productively — to uncover the real goal before committing to a solution.

#Step 2: Identify the actions people need to take

Once the goal is established, the next question is: what do people need to do differently to achieve it? These are actions — specific, observable behaviors — not knowledge domains. "When a customer escalates a complaint, the agent immediately acknowledges the frustration before moving to problem-solving" is an action. "Understanding conflict resolution principles" is not.

This step frequently reveals that the performance gap isn't primarily a knowledge problem. People often know what they're supposed to do. The gap is in execution, habit, environment, or motivation — and those require different interventions.

#Step 3: Identify the causes of inaction

For each required action, Moore asks: why aren't people doing this already? The causes might be genuine lack of knowledge or skill, but they're often something else: unclear expectations, inadequate feedback in the flow of work, environmental barriers, or motivation issues that training cannot fix. Identifying causes accurately is what separates a well-targeted intervention from another course that misses the point.

#Step 4: Design practice activities, not content delivery

The final step is where the design actually happens — and it's almost entirely about practice, not content. If people need to take a specific action, the training should put them in situations where they practice that action, make decisions, face consequences, and adjust. Content exists to support practice, not the other way around.

#Action mapping versus ADDIE

ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate) is the dominant process framework in instructional design. Action mapping doesn't replace it — but it challenges the way Analysis is typically conducted. ADDIE's analysis phase often produces a content inventory: what topics need to be covered? Action mapping replaces this with a performance analysis: what do people need to do, and what's preventing them?

The practical consequence is a different kind of course. Action mapping tends to produce shorter, more focused interventions with more practice and less declarative content. For e-learning specifically, this often means scenario-based learning rather than click-next presentation.

#Why it holds up

Map It is not primarily a book about instructional design methods. It's a book about asking better questions before you design anything. That's its lasting contribution. The action mapping process is simple enough to internalize, and it provides a structured way to push back on the assumption — common among stakeholders and sometimes designers themselves — that more content equals better training.

For L&D teams that regularly receive requests for courses that are really requests for something else (a policy reminder, a management communication, a process fix), action mapping provides both a diagnostic lens and a vocabulary for those conversations.

At Scibly, we see the same pattern frequently: organizations that build lean, action-focused training consistently get better outcomes than those building comprehensive content libraries. Map It makes the case for why — and shows exactly how to design with that principle in mind.