Action Mapping: Cathy Moore's Model Explained with Examples
By Devlin Peck · Updated
Part of the Training Evaluation & Performance guide
Action mapping is Cathy Moore's streamlined approach to training design. Instead of starting with content, you start with a measurable business goal. After that, you backwards through the observable actions people need to take, the practice activities that support those actions, and the minimum information needed to enable that practice.
No single idea has shaped my instructional design work more than this one. Moore's book Map It has had the biggest influence on my practice out of everything I've read in the field, mainly because it forces the focus onto performance (what people need to do) instead of information (what people supposedly need to know). It also solves a problem most training projects trip over: because the map starts with a measurable goal, evaluation is incorporated from day one, which makes measuring training results with the Kirkpatrick model far easier than trying to bolt it on after launch.
I walk through the whole process in this video, and the rest of this guide goes deeper on each step with tables, a worked example, and how the model holds up in an AI-era workflow.
What Is Action Mapping?
Action mapping is a training design model that Cathy Moore created in 2008. It starts from one measurable business goal and works backward through three layers: the observable actions people must take to reach that goal, the practice activities that let people rehearse those actions, and the minimum information required to complete the practice.
The map itself is visual. The business goal sits at the center. Actions branch out from the goal, practice activities branch from the actions, and information hangs off the practice it supports. Moore summarizes the whole model on a free one-page handout that's worth printing and keeping next to your desk.
The core move is a reframe. Most training requests arrive as "people need to know X." Action mapping replaces that with "people need to do X, measurably, on the job." That shift changes everything downstream: your kickoff questions, your activities, your content, and your evaluation plan.
When you shift your focus from what people need to know to what they need to do, the learning experience is night and day.
Here's how the two mindsets compare in practice:
| Information-focused design | Action-focused design | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting question | What do people need to know? | What do people need to do? |
| Objectives sound like | "Understand the policy," "Identify the steps" | "Resolve the billing dispute on the first call" |
| Main activity | Read or watch, then take a quiz | Make decisions in realistic scenarios with consequences |
| Role of content | The product itself | Support material; only what the practice requires |
| Measure of success | Completions and quiz scores | Behavior change and movement on the business metric |
How Do You Create an Action Map?
You create an action map in five steps: define a measurable business goal, identify the observable actions that reach it, diagnose why people aren't taking those actions, design practice activities for the training-worthy gaps, and only add the information that the practice requires. Everything starts with a kickoff meeting that includes the client, subject matter experts, and (critically) people close to the actual problem.
Define the measurable business goal
Before anything else, get the stakeholders in a room and pin down the goal. A viable goal names four things: the metric, the specific gap to close, the timeframe, and the job role that needs to change its behavior. "Improve communication skills" fails this test. "Reduce order errors by 15 percent within two quarters by helping warehouse leads run accurate end-of-shift counts" passes.
This step is also why evaluation stops being an afterthought. The business goal sits at the center of the map the entire time, so you know on day one what you'll measure at the end.
Identify what people need to DO
With the goal set, list the observable, on-the-job actions that move the metric. Each one should be something you could watch someone do (or not do). "Be aware of the escalation policy" is not observable. "Escalate the ticket within one hour when the outage affects more than ten accounts" is.
Then prioritize. Not every action deserves practice time; rank them by impact on the goal and focus on the top few. This step is also your best defense against content dumps. Whenever SMEs came to my projects with a mountain of material, I'd redirect them to the action map: what do people need to actually do, not what do they need to "know"? The map gives that conversation a neutral referee.
Ask why they aren't doing it already
For each high-priority action, diagnose the barrier. The causes fall into four buckets: environment (bad tools, missing job aids, broken processes, no time), knowledge (they don't have the information), skill (they have the information but haven't practiced applying it), and motivation (they see no reason to do it, or incentives push the other way).
Only knowledge and skill gaps are training problems. Environment and motivation barriers call for job aids, process fixes, or management changes, and Moore's "Will training help?" flowchart walks you through that diagnosis question by question. This is the same territory as running a training needs assessment, and it's where you learn to spot when lack of training isn't the real problem.
In my estimate, more than half of the problems instructional designers are asked to solve with courses would be better solved with alternative solutions, and that's a conservative number. The real figure may be much higher. That said, if you haven't built trust and credibility at the organization yet, telling leadership "no course" rarely lands. The practical move is to design something practice-focused instead of an information dump, deliver results, and steer the conversation toward better solutions over time.
Design practice activities first
For the gaps that are training problems, design the practice before you write a word of content. The strongest format is scenario-based: put people in a realistic situation, make them decide, and show them the real-world consequence of the decision rather than "Incorrect, try again."
Moore has observed that most corporate training underestimates the intelligence of the learner and overestimates the difficulty of the challenge, and my experience agrees. Make the challenge as hard as the job actually is.
Then prototype one activity and put it in front of stakeholders and real performers early. The point of the prototype is to let stakeholders see for themselves that an interesting challenge doesn't need time-wasting flashiness. Focus the feedback on whether the decisions are realistic, not on what it looks like.
Include only the minimum information
Content earns its place on the map only by supporting a practice activity. If people need information at the moment of decision, ask whether it belongs in the course at all or whether it should live in performance support like job aids they can use on the job. If it isn't necessary for the person to do what they need to do, then it gets cut. This is why action mapping is so streamlined compared to other approaches: the course shrinks and the results improve at the same time.
When Should You Use Action Mapping?
Action mapping works best when you're solving a performance problem in a business setting: behavior that's observable, a metric that can move, and stakeholders who care about results. It's a weaker fit for pure knowledge domains, compliance-mandated seat time, and academic contexts where the "goal" is understanding rather than measurable behavior change.
| Good fit | Poor fit |
|---|---|
| A business metric is underperforming and specific behavior drives it | Awareness content with no observable behavior attached |
| Sales, service, safety, operations, leadership conversations | Compliance training where the requirement is documented seat time |
| Stakeholders can name (or find) a measurable goal | Academic courses graded on conceptual understanding |
| Skills that benefit from realistic, consequence-driven practice | Reference material people look up rather than learn |
Action Mapping vs. ADDIE: What's the Difference?
They aren't rivals. ADDIE is a project management framework for the whole training lifecycle, while action mapping is a design model that mostly deepens ADDIE's analysis and design phases. Watershed's guide to action mapping makes this integration point well: you can run action mapping inside an ADDIE process and end up with a stronger version of both.
| ADDIE | Action mapping | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | An identified learning need and objectives | A measurable business goal |
| Primary focus | Managing the full development process | Changing on-the-job performance |
| Content philosophy | Often content-out: gather material, then structure it | Minimum information, and only what practice requires |
| Evaluation posture | A phase at the end, easy to shortchange | Built into the goal from the first meeting |
For completeness: SAM (the Successive Approximation Model) answers a different question again. SAM governs how you iterate; action mapping governs what you design. They coexist fine.
What Does an Action Map Look Like? A Worked Example
Here's a hypothetical map, worked end to end, for a common scenario: a support team escalating too many calls. This is an illustrative example, not a client project, so treat the numbers as placeholders for your own.
Business goal: Reduce escalations to tier 2 support agents by 20 percent within six months by helping tier 1 agents resolve billing disputes on the first call.
| High-priority action | Why they aren't doing it | Practice activity | Minimum information |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pull the billing history before responding to the complaint | Skill: agents know how, but skip it under pressure | Timed role play: angry caller opens with a wrong charge; the agent must gather facts before offering a fix | One-line checklist pinned in the ticketing tool |
| Apply the discount matrix correctly | Environment: the matrix lives in a buried PDF | No training; fix the tool | Rebuild the matrix as a searchable job aid |
| De-escalate with acknowledge-then-options language | Skill: agents default to policy-quoting | Branching conversation scenario where policy-quoting visibly escalates the caller | Three example phrasings inside the activity feedback |
| Log the dispute's root cause code | Motivation: codes feel like busywork | No training; manager explains how codes drive fixes, and the form drops to two clicks | None |
Notice what happened: four actions went in, and only two came out as training. One became a tool fix and one became a management conversation plus a form change. That's the model working as intended.
If you want to watch a map get built live, here's Cathy Moore action-mapping a real scenario.
What Are Common Action Mapping Mistakes?
The most common mistakes are mapping topics instead of actions, skipping the barrier analysis, and treating the model as decoration on top of a content dump. Here's the full list I see most often:
- Mapping topics instead of actions. "Understand the refund policy" is a topic. "Apply the refund policy when approving returns over $200" is an action. If you can't observe it, rewrite it.
- Skipping the barrier analysis. Jumping straight from actions to content assumes every gap is a knowledge gap. Environment and motivation barriers then survive the training untouched, and the metric doesn't move.
- Treating it as mind mapping. Free-associating content around a theme produces a pretty diagram and an information dump. Every node must trace back to the goal.
- Bolting evaluation on at the end. If the goal was measurable in step 1, evaluation was designed before the first slide existed. Scrambling for a smile-sheet metric at launch means step 1 was skipped.
- Drowning the practice in content. Teams do the map, then pour the SME's full deck in anyway "just in case." Information that supports no activity belongs in a job aid or the trash.
How Does Action Mapping Fit an AI-Era Workflow?
The model itself hasn't changed since I first covered it in 2021, but the practice-activity layer has expanded dramatically. Where step 4 used to mean branching click-through scenarios, learners can now rehearse the mapped actions in open conversation with an AI character: speaking to an upset customer out loud, getting evaluated against the exact criteria on your map, and seeing a transcript of what they said.
This is the problem my company devlin.ai exists to solve, so read this paragraph knowing I built the thing. You describe the scenario in plain English, get a working voice or text simulation, and embed it in Storyline, Rise, or any LMS, with AI evaluation, transcripts, and scores reporting back to the course. Voice is what makes the practice feel real, especially for the conversation-heavy actions that action maps tend to surface. For aspiring designers, there's a Starter plan at $9 per month ($6 per month paid annually), and these projects make strong portfolio pieces precisely because they show what typical Storyline courses don't: instructional design thinking, scenario design skill, and performance-based learning design.
AI helps earlier in the process too. With permission, and if your organization allows it, you can feed the kickoff meeting transcript into a tool like Claude Code and have it draft the action map from your SME interview notes, or prototype the practice activities themselves. Treat the output as a draft: you still own the analysis, and the map still gets verified with your SMEs and stakeholders. But the blank-page phase of steps 1 through 4 is far faster than it was.
What Tools and Resources Help You Learn Action Mapping?
Start with Cathy Moore's own material; she's the creator and her resources are the canonical version. Then practice on a real (or realistic) project, because the model only clicks once you've run a kickoff meeting with it.
- Map It, Moore's book-length treatment of the model. It's the single most useful ID book I've read, and I break down exactly why in my full review of Map It.
- Moore's free downloads for Map It readers: worksheets and job aids that turn the book into a working toolkit.
- A mapping tool. MindMeister is my standing recommendation for building the visual map collaboratively, though a whiteboard and sticky notes work fine in a live kickoff.
And if you're learning this process as part of a move into the field: Peck Academy is my licensed career school for career transitioners. Students learn foundational ID theory (the thinking behind models like this one), build a flagship Storyline 360 project with extensive feedback, and put together a portfolio website with career support along the way.
However you learn it, the habit to build is the same one this whole article circles: start every project by asking what people need to do, and let the goal decide everything else.