Every January, owners sit down with a blank page. A new website brief, a new marketing plan, a new training manual for the next hire. It feels like progress. But if your business has been running for a year or more, the blank page throws away the most valuable thing you own: a record of what actually happened.

• ADDIE is the model for building something new; EDDIE is the model for improving something that already works
• Your last campaign, last website and last training class already hold the answers to what should change
• Starting over burns time and attention you could spend fixing the two or three things that matter most

The restart trap

Instructional designers have used a five-step model called ADDIE since the 1970s: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation. It is a good model, and it is supposed to loop. The trouble is how most people run the loop. When the cycle comes back around, they start again at Analysis, as if nothing had been learned the first time.

Businesses do the same thing. A shop that rewrites its whole brand questionnaire every year. A firm that rebuilds its onboarding from scratch for every new class of hires. A company that commissions a new website because the old one feels tired, without asking which pages actually brought in calls. The founding decisions (who you serve, what you sell, where you work) rarely change from one year to the next. What changes is performance. And performance is the one thing the blank page ignores.

Meet EDDIE, ADDIE’s older brother

In my graduate work at the University of New Mexico, I proposed a re-sequenced model for projects that have already grown up. I call it EDDIE: Evaluation, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation. The change is small. Evaluation moves from the end of the cycle to the front. But the shift is significant, because it means every new round begins with evidence instead of assumptions.

The learning science backs this up. Researchers Kalyuga, Chandler and Sweller showed in 1998 that the instruction that helps a beginner can slow down an expert, because the expert already holds the basics in their head. Design teams work the same way. Once you know your customers, your market and your tools, re-running the full analysis is like making a veteran mechanic re-read the owner’s manual. Don Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, calls good iteration a spiral: each pass makes progress rather than returning to the starting point. EDDIE is that spiral, written down.

EDDIE in three places you already work

You do not need a training department to use this. Here is what it looks like in the three places most small businesses invest:

• Your website: begin a redesign with the numbers from the current site. Which pages bring calls, which forms get filled, which searches find you. Then design around what works.
• Your marketing: begin next quarter with last quarter. Cost per lead, the posts that brought real conversations, the emails people opened. Cut what did not work before you add anything new.
• Your staff training: begin with where new hires actually stumbled. The question they asked three times, the mistake that cost a customer. Fix those pages, not the whole manual.

In each case, the evaluation is not a report that sits in a drawer. It is the brief for the next round. As I wrote in the original paper, “the most productive entry point for a revision cycle is data, not assumptions.”

When to go back to the beginning

EDDIE is a refinement model, not a rule against ever starting fresh. Some changes are big enough that the old evidence no longer applies, and then a full analysis is the right call. Go back to the beginning when:

• You open a new location or move into a new market
• Your customers change in a fundamental way, such as moving from homeowners to commercial accounts
• You replace the platform underneath the work, like moving training from in person to fully online
• A regulator or accreditor requires a documented needs analysis

That is reinvention. Most of the year, most businesses are doing refinement, and refinement should start with what happened.

Your business already has a history, and that history is the cheapest research you will ever do. Before you plan the next website, campaign or training program, look hard at the last one. ADDIE builds the house. EDDIE renovates it.

For the full research paper, read EDDIE, ADDIE’s Older Brother on EducateYourBusiness.com. To put this to work on your own training or website, book a working session.

Peregrine Digital Media · Albuquerque, New Mexico · 505-296-0419 · peregrinedigital.com