The Perils In Chronicling the Emergence of Human Performance Technology – Rummler 2003

A Conversation on LinkedIn about the Roots of HPT Sparked This Post

November 1, 2003

Dear Editor,

I want to comment on Tony O”Driscoll’s ambitious, but risky, undertaking in the July issue of Performance Improvement – that is, to chronicle the emergence of Human Performance Technology. The effort is ambitious in trying to provide an accurate synthesis of a very complex and diverse field of endeavor in a few pages. It is risky because so much of the critical history of the field of HPT is buried deep in the relatively unpublished activities of the 1960’s. Dale Brethower has suggested (and I agree) that most all of the “discovery” that is the foundation of what has become HPT was done in the period 1958-69.

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And from 1970 to the present, the rest of the world has been learning and applying the important notions developed in the ‘60’s, as they were slowly made public through various publications, presentations and workshops. These two distinct phases in the history of HPT – first, discovery of the basic principles of HPT by the original thinkers/innovators and second, the “discovery” of the power and application of the principles by the rest of the world – emphasize that the “history” of an idea/invention does not begin with its public acceptance.

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For the rest of Geary’s 2003 letter to the editor – which he had shared with me before this was published – as I was then the President of ISPI – when he was prompted to write this – please go to this PDF: Perils – Rummler and his history of HPT.