Common Sense and Intuition Not Enough

Jay Cross jumped in early with a response to this month's Big Question. The question this month is:

For a given project, how do you determine if, when, and how much an instructional designer and instructional design are needed?

Jay Cross response concludes with:

The answer this month’s Big Question is: common sense and intuition.

I love mixing it up with Jay. Neither of us is shy about our opinions. And while I would agree with him that the current answer to the question is common sense and intuition, this shouldn't be the answer going forward. It's clearly insufficient. How do you back it up when you ask for funding?

Further if you look at Jay's examples and turn those into theoretical projects, e.g., help audience X, with background Y:

• learn to speak French
• learn the way to the store
• learn Ruby on Rails
• learn to negotiate
• learn to taste wine critically
• learn to lead effectively

You would need to break down each quite a bit more right. Haven't we already required some ID? So is there some level in every "help learn ..." type task?

I don't buy that the end of the answer is common sense and intuition.