Nov 1 2022

Closing L&D’s Non-Impact Gaps

These gaps were pointed out to me as I joined the profession. We don’t have much Impact – or enough Impact – back on the job in terms of people’s performance improvement.

We focus too often, as Tom Gilbert complained about in his 1978 book, Human Competence, on Behaviors, without a clear link to the Tasks and Outputs of the Performance Requirements. And we get distracted with the next new shiny object – most often technology and sometimes techniques.

And little has changed since 1979 IMO, except for the technology that enables us to do our work, administrate our work, and deploy of work.

We are, as the old joke goes, “Opportunity Rich.”

If you feel as I do that our goal is to help people learn how to become more Performance Competent back on their jobs, then our ultimate measure of success is improved performance in terms of Outputs being produced better, faster, and cheaper.

In my view, it takes L&D Management, putting into place better, faster, and cheaper Processes and Practices with a Performance Focus and Philosophy.

I’ve been writing and presenting on my approach – sharing – working out loud – since before 1982. But on November 1st, 1982, my business partner, the late Ray Svenson, and I, flew from Chicago to Houston on my first day as a consultant – and before our meeting the next day with our Exxon clients – we presented at the local chapter of NSPI (which is ISPI today) on “Job Modeling.”

That’s something I still do today, but I hadn’t yet changed that label to Performance Modeling or Performance Analysis, which I soon did as my consulting work often focused on Processes with multiple versus single jobs – and addressed all of the performance requirements. That was something Joe Harless once challenged me on as he was calling his version Job Models, as were many others in NSPI/ISPI and elsewhere.

I have now published 34 books since the first in 1994, and I have one with an editor (since June).

So, that’s soon to be 35. Almost all address aspects of Performance Analysis. Some of those books are big-books, and some are mini-books. Plus, there are a boatload of free articles, free blog posts, and free videos that address Performance Modeling/Analysis – and what to do with that data after generating it, in reviewing the data, and its use downstream in Design & Development & Evaluation.

Use the search function.