A lot of e-learning comes down to e-telling, regardless of how engaging it might be. That's because we don't often give learners a chance to practice what they are learning. By practice, I mean: Try...fail. Try again...fail better.

The center point of simulations is practice, and so when you begin to do instructional design for simulations, you will likely have to break out of your normal box, in order to be successful. You will also find, at least at first, that you end up doing a lot more work than than you normally might.

Practice in simulations will always be more work than less immersive simulations...so you need to become efficient at it.

Practice means providing the learner options that force them to make decisions. Not easy black and white decisions...if learners don't have much chance to fail, they don't have much chance to learn, either. The matrix of options and varying paths that different decisions create, plus accompanying remediation or coaching...well, all of that takes time.

If you are clear, structured and organized in your design approach you will save yourself a lot of time and confusion. You will also deliver these same benefits to your clients and SMEs.

The diagram below presents the kind of organization that you may find useful. In this case, it relates to a retail selling scenario, but the same kind of logic should apply to pretty much any soft skills process, such as leadership or coaching.

The key concept here is to identify common elements that consistently come into play and learn what you have to know from an SME before you can complete your design. 

A selling scenario deals with human interaction, and matching a product with the customer's needs. So naturally you have to know the different options for customer types and preferences and how that relates to the products and selling approaches.

You are basically creating characters and a play, where you write the dialog that both the sales person, and the customer (and maybe a coach) will act out.

It's easy to get your SMEs roped into the instructional design process (confusing them and wasting their time) unless you are clear about these kind of parameters. So, your goal is to use your understanding of these common elements and how they shape the process...in order to simply get the right information from the SME. Then you can begin the work of writing your play.

I'm saying this last, but the place you want to start is: what decisions and behaviors will it be valuable for the learner to practice?