The War on Documents

There’s a category of L&D tooling that’s been pushing harder over the past year or so, and the pitch is always some version of the same thing: drop your PDFs, manuals, policies, and guides into the converter, wait a few minutes, and receive in return a video, a podcast, an interactive e-learning module, or some other shinier modality. The premise; documents are dead, nobody reads anymore, and the only respectable thing to do with the millions of files sitting on your organisation’s shared drive is to feed them into a converter and turn them into something else.

Every modality has its place, and the right modality in the right context is the right answer. Video, audio, interactive content, in-person workshops, and written guidance can each be effective, and each can be wasteful, depending on what you’re trying to achieve and who you’re trying to reach. Variety, when chosen with intent, is welcome.

The problem is that variety chosen with intent isn’t what these conversion tools are selling. They’re selling the proposition that the document itself is the problem, and that any document, regardless of its content, audience, or purpose, can and should be reformatted into something more “engaging.” That claim sits awkwardly against centuries of practical experience, given that we have been writing things down and sharing them with one another in document form throughout recorded history, and books continue to be written and sold in their millions. It sits even more awkwardly against the research on how people learn from different media.

Paid subscribers receive an exclusive fortnightly omnibus edition containing an additional five to six articles, as well as early access to instalments in the L&D Field Guide book series.

Modality research and metaphor

Clark (1983), coined the metaphor stating that media are “mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition.” The vehicle matters for cost, distribution, and access; the nutrition is in the groceries. Subsequent meta-analyses of media comparison studies have produced the same finding consistently: when you control for the instructional method, the apparent advantages of one medium over another either shrink to triviality or disappear altogether.

Where an e-learning module appears more “engaging” than the document it was derived from, that’s almost always a function of the design effort that went into the e-learning, not any inherent property of video, graphics, audio etc.; the same design effort applied to the document would, in most cases, yield comparable outcomes. The medium is the truck. The instructional design choices are the groceries.

What this means in practice

A document that has worked for ten years, that people read, and that supports the performance it was designed to support does not need to be turned into a video because a tool has appeared that can do it. The questions a competent designer asks before changing a working asset are familiar enough:

• Who is using this?

• In what context?

• For what purpose?

• Is the current format helping or hindering that purpose?

Those questions are absent from almost every conversion-tool pitch I have seen.

The same logic applies to lectures, incidentally, which have been written off rather unfairly in my contexts. A well-designed lecture, delivered to an appropriate audience on content suited to the format, is an effective and efficient way to convey information. It has been so for centuries, and the evidence base has not collapsed because newer modalities have arrived. What changed is fashion.

The cost

There is a real cost to the implicit message that documents are bad form. It pushes organisations to spend time and money converting assets that did not need converting, often producing inferior versions of what they already had. It distracts designers from the work that does drive outcomes, which is the diagnosis of performance problems and the design of interventions matched to their causes. It also flatters the assumption that engagement and effectiveness are interchangeable.

Sending people a PDF, when a PDF is the right tool, is a competent professional decision. So is delivering a workshop, recording a video, designing an e-learning module, or writing a book. The right question is which modality fits the problem you are solving, the people you are solving it for, and the outcome you are trying to produce. Fashion in 2026 is not a useful input to that question. The next time a tool, an advert, or a webinar argues that documents are over and that conversion is inevitable and you just need ot get onboard, ask where the consideration of context sits in the pitch.

Documents are a legitimate, effective way to communicate information to professionals at work. They will remain so for as long as we have ideas worth writing down.

References

Clark, R.E. (1983) ‘Reconsidering Research on Learning from Media’, Review of Educational Research, 53(4), pp. 445-459.