Tag Archive for: performance

I included this piece in my newsletter this morning (which you can sign up for here) and it seemed to really resonate with people, so I’m including it here.

I’ve always had a high tolerance for pain, but breaking my collarbone at the end of February really sent me crashing down a mountain. Lying in bed, I got thinking about the emotional side of workplace performance. I don’t have brilliant insights here, just maybe some thoughts that will get you thinking.

Skiing with my family in Vermont, it had been a very good week. My wife and I, skiing together on our next-to-last day on the mountain, went to look for the kids who told us they’d be skiing in the terrain park (where the jumps are). My wife skied down first, then I went. There was a little jump, about a foot high, of the kind I’d jumped many times. But this time would be different.

As I sailed over the jump — slowly because I’m wary of going too fast and flying too far — I looked down and saw, NOT snow, but stairs. WTF? Every other time I took a small jump there was snow on the other side. Not metal stairs. Not dry metal stairs. In mid-air my thought was, “okay, just stay calm, you’ll ski over the stairs back to snow.” Alas, what happened was that I came crashing down on my left shoulder, collarbone splintering into five or six pieces, and lay 20 feet down the hill. I knew right away that things were bad. I knew that my life would be upended for weeks or months. I knew that miserable times lay ahead.

I got up quickly. I was in shock and knew it. I looked up the mountain back at the jump. Freakin’ stairs!! What they hell were they doing there? I was rip-roaring mad! One of my skis was still on the stairs. The dry surface must have grabbed it, preventing me from skiing further down the slope. I retrieved my ski. A few people skied by me. My wife was long gone down the mountain. I was in shock and I was mad as hell and I couldn’t think straight, but I knew I shouldn’t sit down so I just stood there for five or ten minutes in a daze. Finally someone asked if I was okay, and I yelled crazy loud for the whole damn mountain to hear, “NO!” He was nice, said he’d contact the ski patrol.

I’ll spare you the details of the long road to recovery — a recovery not yet complete — but the notable events are that I had badly broken my collarbone, badly sprained my right thumb and mildly sprained my left thumb, couldn’t button my shirts or pants for a while, had to lie in bed in one position or the pain would be too great, watched a ton of Netflix (I highly recommend Seven Seconds!), couldn’t do my work, couldn’t help around the house, got surgery on my collarbone, got pneumonia, went to physical therapy, etc… Enough!

Feeling completely useless, I couldn’t help reflect on the emotional side of learning, development, and workplace performance in general. In L&D, we tend to be helping people who are able to learn and take actions — but maybe not all the people we touch are emotionally present and able. Some are certainly dealing with family crises, personal insecurities, previous job setbacks, and the like. Are we doing enough for them?

I’m not a person prone to depression, but I was clearly down for the count. My ability to do meaningful work was nil. At first it was the pain and the opiates. Later it was the knowledge that I just couldn’t get much work done, that I was unable to keep up with promises I’d made, that I was falling behind. I knew, intellectually, that I just had to wait it out — and this was a great comfort. But still, my inability to think and to work reminded me that as a learning professional I ought to be more empathetic with learners who may be suffering as well.

Usually, dealing with emotional issues of an employee falls to the employee and his or her manager. I used to be a leadership trainer and I don’t remember preparing my learners for how to deal with direct reports who might be emotionally unready to fully engage with work. Fortunately today we are willing to talk about individual differences, but I think we might be forgetting the roller-coaster ride of being human, that we may differ in our emotional readiness on any given day. Managers/supervisors rightly are the best resource for dealing with such issues, but we in L&D might have a role to play as well.

I don’t have answers here. I wish I did. Probably it begins with empathy. We also can help more when we know our learners more — and when we can look them in the eyes. This is tricky business though. We’re not qualified to be therapists and simple solutions like being nice and kind and keeping things positive is not always the answer. We know from the research that challenging people with realistic decision-making challenges is very beneficial. Giving honest feedback on poor performance is beneficial.

We should probably avoid scolding and punishment and reprimands. Competition has been shown to harmful in at least some learning situations. Leaderboards may make emotional issues worse, and generally the limited research suggests they aren’t very useful anyway. But these negative actions are rarely invoked, so we have to look deeper.

I wish I had more wisdom about this. I wish there was research-based evidence I could draw on. I wish I could say more than just be human, empathetic, understanding.

Now that I’m aware of this, I’m going to keep my eyes and ears open to learning more about how we as learning professionals can design learning interventions to be more sensitive to the ups and downs of our fellow travelers.

If you’ve got good ideas, please send them my way or use the LinkedIn Post generated from this to join the discussion.

I was speaking to a CLO (Chief Learning Officer) today about research-to-practice stuff, and he made a statement that blew my mind. It was brilliant!

First, a little background.

He’s been a CLO at two organizations with over a decade of tenure in learning-executive positions. He knows what he’s talking about.

He talked persuasively about how many learning and development units are stuck in the old-world view of learning as delivering training (and training alone). In such learning cultures, L&D folks are order takers. A more enlightened approach includes training, but it also involves performance-consulting, performance-facilitation, knowledge management, improved evaluations, etc., with a key goal of helping to create a partnership between L&D and its organizational stakeholders.

Okay, that’s not news. We know this is the right thing to do.

Here’s what struck me as illuminating. He said that what’s really needed to make the leap from the old way to the new way, you need a large capital-like investment to get you started, to bring in committed change agents, to overcome inertia, to have resources and tools to let you leverage research-based methods. Without a large resource infusion, you get incremental change, but it’s just not enough to change the culture so you end up fighting long exhausting battles with only some success.

But what CEO’s are going to be so enlightened as to pony up the dough?

You’d think they might. After all, making huge investments upfront is what successful businesses do, what successful entrepreneurs do, what successful athletes do, etc.

We in L&D have to figure out a way to convince our CEO’s to make the investment. Otherwise, we’ll likely remain in the purgatory of order taking henceforth.

 

Clark Quinn and I have started debating top-tier issues in the workplace learning field. In the first one, we debated who has the ultimate responsibility in our field. In the second one, we debated whether the tools in our field are up to the task.

In this third installment of the series, we’ve engaged in an epic battle about the worth of the 4-Level Kirkpatrick Model. Clark and I believe that these debates help elucidate critical issues in the field. I also think they help me learn. This debate still intrigues me, and I know I’ll come back to it in the future to gain wisdom.

And note, Clark and I certainly haven’t resolved all the issues raised. Indeed, we’d like to hear your wisdom and insights in the comments section.

————————–

Will:

I want to pick on the second-most renowned model in instructional design, the 4-Level Kirkpatrick Model. It produces some of the most damaging messaging in our industry. Here’s a short list of its treacherous triggers: (1) It completely ignores the importance of remembering to the instructional design process, (2) It pushes us learning folks away from a focus on learning—where we have the most leverage, (3) It suggests that Level 4 (organizational results) and Level 3 (behavior change) are more important than measuring learning—but this is an abdication of our responsibility for the learning results themselves, (4) It implies that Level 1 (learner opinions) are on the causal chain from training to performance, but two major meta-analyses show this to be false—smile sheets, as now utilized, are not correlated with learning results! If you force me, I’ll share a quote from a top-tier research review that damns the Kirkpatrick model with a roar. “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

 

Clark:

I laud that you’re not mincing words!   And I’ll agree and disagree.  To address your concerns: 1) Kirkpatrick is essentially orthogonal to the remembering process. It’s not about learning, it’s about aligning learning to impact.  2) I also think that Kirkpatrick doesn’t push us away from learning, though it isn’t exclusive to learning (despite everyday usage). Learning isn’t the only tool, and we should be willing to use job aids (read: performance support) or any other mechanism that can impact the organizational outcome.  We need to be performance consultants! 3) Learning in and of itself isn’t important; it’s what we’re doing with it that matters. You could ensure everyone could juggle chainsaws, but unless it’s Cirque de Soleil, I wouldn’t see the relevance.

So I fully agree with Kirkpatrick on working backwards from the org problem and figuring out what we can do to improve workplace behavior.  Level 2 is about learning, which is where your concerns are, in my mind, addressed.  But then you need to go back and see if what they’re able to do now is what is going to help the org!  And I’d counter that the thing I worry about is the faith that if we do learning, it is good.  No, we need to see if that learning is impacting the org.  4) Here’s where I agree, that Level 1 (and his numbering) led people down the garden path: people seem to think it’s ok to stop at level 1!  Which is maniacal, because what learners think has essentially zero correlation with whether it’s working (as you aptly say)).  So it has led to some really bad behavior, serious enough to make me think it’s time for some recreational medication!

 

Will:

Actually, I’m flashing back to grad school. “Orthogonal” was one of the first words I remember learning in the august halls of my alma mater. But my digression is perpendicular to this discussion, so forget about it! Here’s the thing. A model that is supposed to align learning to impact ought to have some truth about learning baked into its DNA. It’s less than half-baked, in my not-so-humble opinion.

As they might say in the movies, the Kirkpatrick Model is not one of God’s own prototypes! We’re responsible people, so we ought to have a model that doesn’t distract us from our most important leverage points. Working backward is fine, but we’ve got to go all the way through the causal path to get to the genesis of the learning effects. Level 1 is a distraction, not a root. Yes, Level 2 is where the K-Model puts learning, but learning back in 1959 is not the same animal that it is today. We actually have a pretty good handle on how learning works now. Any model focused on learning evaluation that omits remembering is a model with a gaping hole.

 

Clark:

Ok, now I’m confused.  Why should a model of impact need to have learning in its genes?  I don’t care whether you move the needle with performance support, formal learning, or magic jelly beans; what K talks about is evaluating impact.  What you measure at Level 2 is whether they can do the task in a simulated environment.  Then you see if they’re applying it at the workplace, and whether it’s having an impact.

No argument that we have to use an approach to evaluate whether we’re having the impact at level 2 that we should, but to me that’s a separate issue.  Kirkpatrick just doesn’t care what tool we’re using, nor should it.  Kirkpatrick doesn’t care whether you’re using behavioral, cognitive, constructivist, or voodoo magic to make the impact, as long as you’re trying something.

We should be defining our metric for level 2, arguably, to be some demonstrable performance that we think is appropriate, but I think the model can safely be ignorant of the measure we choose at level 2 and 3 and 4.  It’s about making sure we have the chain.  I’d be worried, again, that talking about learning at level 2 might let folks off the hook about level 3 and 4 (which we see all too often) and make it a matter of faith. So I’m gonna argue that including the learning into the K model is less optimal than keeping it independent. Why make it more complex than need be?  So, now, what say you?

 

Will:

Clark! How can you say the Kirkpatrick model is agnostic to the means of obtaining outcomes? Level 2 is “LEARNING!” It’s not performance support, it’s not management intervention, it’s not methamphetamine. Indeed, the model was focused on training.

The Kirkpatricks (Don and Jim) have argued—I’ve heard them live and in the flesh—that the four levels represent a causal pathway from 1 to 4. In addition, the notion of working backward implies that there is a causal connection between the levels. The four-level model implies that a good learner experience is necessary for learning, that learning is necessary for on-the-job behavior, and that successful on-the-job behavior is necessary for positive organizational results. Furthermore, almost everybody interprets it this way.

The four levels imply impact at each level, but look at all the factors that they are missing! For example, learners need to be motivated to apply what they’ve learned. Where is that in the model? Motivation can be an impact too! We as learning professionals can influence motivation. There are other impacts we can make as well. We can make an impact on what learners remember, whether learners are supported back on the job, etc.

Here’s what a 2012 seminal research review from a top-tier scientific journal concluded: “The Kirkpatrick framework has a number of theoretical and practical shortcomings. [It] is antithetical to nearly 40 years of research on human learning, leads to a checklist approach to evaluation (e.g., ‘we are measuring Levels 1 and 2, so we need to measure Level 3’), and, by ignoring the actual purpose for evaluation, risks providing no information of value to stakeholders… (p. 91). That’s pretty damning!

 

Clark:

I don’t see the Kirkpatrick model as an evaluation of the learning experience, but instead of the learning impact.   I see it as determining the effect of a programmatic intervention on an organization.  Sure, there are lots of other factors: motivation, org culture, effective leadership, but if you try to account for everything in one model you’re going to accomplish nothing.  You need some diagnostic tools, and Kirkpatrick’s model is one.

If they can’t perform appropriately at the end of the learning experience (level 2), that’s not a Kirkpatrick issue, the model just lets you know where the problem is. Once they can, and it’s not showing up in the workplace (level 3), then you get into the org factors. It is about creating a chain of impact on the organization, not evaluating the learning design.  I agree that people misuse the model, so when people only do 1 or 2, they’re wasting time and money. Kirkpatrick himself said he should’ve numbered it the other way around.

Now if you want to argue that that, in itself, is enough reason to chuck it, fine, but let’s replace it with another impact model with a different name, but the same intent of focusing on the org impact, workplace behavior changes, and then intervention. I hear a lot of venom directed at the Kirkpatrick model, but I don’t see it ‘antithetical to learning’.

And I worry the contrary; I see too many learning interventions done without any consideration of the impact on the organization.  Not just compliance, but ‘we need a course on X’ and they do it, without ever looking to see whether a course on X will remedy the biz problem. What I like about Kirkpatrick is that it does (properly used) put the focus on the org impact first.

 

Will:

Sounds like you’re holding on to Kirkpatrick because you like its emphasis on organizational performance. Let’s examine that for a moment. Certainly, we’d like to ensure that Intervention X produces Outcome Y. You and I agree. Hugs all around. Let’s move away from learning for a moment. Let’s go Mad Men and look at advertising. Today, advertising is very sophisticated, especially online advertising because companies can actually track click-rates, and sometimes can even track sales (for items sold online). So, in a best-case scenario, it works this way:

  • Level 1 – Web surfers says they like the advertisement
  • Level 2 – Web surfers show comprehension by clicking on link.
  • Level 3 – Web surfers spend time reading/watching on splash page.
  • Level 4 – Web surfers buy the product offered on the splash page.

A business person’s dream! Except that only a very small portion of sales actually happen this way (although, I must admit, the rate is increasing). But let’s look at a more common example. When a car is advertised, it’s impossible to track advertising through all four levels. People who buy a car at a dealer can’t be definitively tracked to an advertisement.

So, would we damn our advertising team? Would we ask them to prove that their advertisement increased car sales? Certainly, they are likely to be asked to make the case…but it’s doubtful anybody takes those arguments seriously… and shame on folks who do!

In case, I’m ignorant of how advertising works behind the scenes—which is a possibility, I’m a small “m” mad man—let me use some other organizational roles to make my case.

  • Is our legal team asked to prove that their performance in defending a lawsuit is beneficial to the company? No, everyone appreciates their worth.
  • Do our recruiters have to jump through hoops to prove that their efforts have organizational value? They certainly track their headcounts, but are they asked to prove that those hires actually do the company good? No!
  • Do our maintenance staff have to get out spreadsheets to show how their work saves on the cost of new machinery? No!
  • Do our office cleaning professionals have to utilize regression analyses to show how they’ve increased morale and productivity? No again!

There should be a certain disgust in feeling we have to defend our good work every time…when others don’t have to.

I use the Mad Men example to say that all this OVER-EMPHASIS on proving that our learning is producing organizational outcomes might be a little too much. A couple of drinks is fine, but drinking all day is likely to be disastrous.

Too many words is disastrous too…But I had to get that off my chest…

 

Clark:

I do see a real problem in communication here, because I see that the folks you cite *do* have to have an impact. They aren’t just being effective, but they have to meet some level of effectiveness. To use your examples: the legal team has to justify its activities in terms of the impact on the business. If they’re too tightened down about communications in the company, they might stifle liability, but they can also stifle innovation. And if they don’t provide suitable prevention against legal action, they’re turfed out.   Similarly, recruiters have to show that they’re not interviewing too many, or too few people, and getting the right ones. They’re held up against retention rates and other measures.  The maintenance staff does have to justify headcount against the maintenance costs, and those costs against the alternative of replacement of equipment (or outsourcing the servicing).  And the office cleaning folks have to ensure they’re meeting environmental standards at an efficient rate.  There are standards of effectiveness everywhere in the organization except L&D.  Why should we be special?

Let’s go on: sales has to estimate numbers for each quarter, and put that up against costs. They have to hit their numbers, or explain why (and if their initial estimates are low, they can be chastised for not being aggressive enough). They also worry about the costs of sales, hit rates, and time to a signature. Marketing, too, has to justify expenditure. To use your example, they do care about how many people come to the site, how long they stay, how many pages they hit, etc. And they try to improve these. At the end of the day, the marketing investment has to impact the sales. Eventually, they do track site activity to dollars. They have to. If we don’t, we get boondoggles. If you don’t rein in marketing initiatives, you get these shenanigans where existing customers are boozed up and given illegal gifts that eventually cause a backlash against the company. Shareholders get a wee bit stroppy when they find that investments aren’t paying off, and that the company is losing unnecessary money.

It’s not a case of ‘if you build it, it is good’! You and I both know that much of what is done in the name of formal learning (and org L&D activity in general) isn’t valuable. People take orders and develop courses where a course isn’t needed. Or create learning events that don’t achieve the outcomes. Kirkpatrick is the measure that tracks learning investments back to impact on the business.  and that’s something we have to start paying attention to. As someone once said, if you’re not measuring, why bother? Show me the money! And if you’re just measuring your efficiency, that your learning is having the desired behavioral change, how do you know that behavior change is necessary to the organization? And until we get out of the mode where we do the things we do on faith,  and start understanding have a meaningful impact on the organization, we’re going to continue to be the last to have an influence on the organization, and the first to be cut when things are tough. Yet we have the opportunity to be as critical to the success of the organization as IT! I can’t stand by seeing us continue to do learning without knowing that it’s of use. Yes, we do need to measure our learning for effectiveness as learning, as you argue, but we have to also know that what we’re helping people be able to do is what’s necessary. Kirkpatrick isn’t without flaws, numbering, level 1, etc. But it’s a clear value chain that we need to pay attention to. I’m not saying in lieu of measuring our learning effectiveness, but in addition. I can’t see it any other way.

 

Will:

Okay, I think we’ve squeezed the juice out of this tobacco. I would have said “orange” but the Kirkpatrick Model has been so addictive for so long…and black is the new orange anyway…

I want to pick up on your great examples of individuals in an organizations needing to have an impact. You noted, appropriately, that everyone must have an impact. The legal team has to prevent lawsuits, recruiters have to find acceptable applicants, maintenance has to justify their worth compared to outsourcing options, cleaning staff have to meet environmental standards, sales people have to sell, and so forth.

Here is the argument I’m making: Employees should be held to account within their circles of maximum influence, and NOT so much in their circles of minimum influence.

So for example, let’s look at the legal team.

Doesn’t it make sense that the legal team should be held to account for the number of lawsuits and amount paid in damages more than they should be held to account for the level of innovation and risk taking within the organization?

What about the cleaning professionals?

Shouldn’t we hold them more accountable for measures of perceived cleanliness and targeted environmental standards than for the productivity of the workforce?

What about us learning-and-performance professionals?

Shouldn’t we be held more accountable for whether our learners comprehend and remember what we’ve taught them more than whether they end up increasing revenue and lowering expenses?

I agree that we learning-and-performance professionals have NOT been properly held to account. As you say, “There are standards of effectiveness everywhere in the organization except L&D.” My argument is that we, as learning-and-performance professionals, should have better standards of effectiveness—but that we should have these largely within our maximum circles of influence.

Among other things, we should be held to account for the following impacts:

  • Whether our learning interventions create full comprehension of the learning concepts.
  • Whether they create decision-making competence.
  • Whether they create and sustain remembering.
  • Whether they promote a motivation and sense-of-efficacy to apply what was learned.
  • Whether they prompt actions directly, particularly when job aids and performance support are more effective.
  • Whether they enable successful on-the-job performance.
  • Et cetera.

Final word, Clark?

 

Clark:

First, I think you’re hoist by your own petard.  You’re comparing apples and your squeezed orange. Legal is measured by lawsuits, maintenance by cleanliness, and learning by learning. Ok that sounds good, except that legal is measured by lawsuits against the organization. And maintenance is measured by the cleanliness of the premises.  Where’s the learning equivalent?  It has to be: impact on decisions that affect organizational outcomes.  None of the classic learning evaluations evaluate whether the objectives are right, which is what Kirkpatrick does. They assume that, basically, and then evaluate whether they achieve the objective.

That said, Will, if you can throw around diagrams, I can too. Here’s my attempt to represent the dichotomy. Yes, you’re successfully addressing the impact of the learning on the learner. That is, can they do the task. But I’m going to argue that that’s not what Kirkpatrick is for. It’s to address the impact of the intervention on the organization. The big problem is, to me, whether the objectives we’ve developed the learning to achieve are objectives that are aligned with organizational need. There’s plenty of evidence it’s not.

 

So here I’m trying to show what I see K doing. You start with the needed business impact: more sales, lower compliance problems, what have you. Then you decide what has to happen in the workplace to move that needle.  Say, shorter time to sales, so the behavior is decided to be timeliness in producing proposals. Let’s say the intervention is training on the proposal template software. You design a learning experience to address that objective, to develop ability to use the software. You use the type of evaluation you’re talking about to see if it’s actually developing their ability. Then you use K to see if it’s actually being used in the workplace (are people using the software to create proposals), and then to see if it’d affecting your metrics of quicker turnaround. (And, yes, you can see if they like the learning experience, and adjust that.)

And if any one element isn’t working: learning, uptake, impact, you debug that.  But K is evaluating the impact process, not the learning design. It should flag if the learning design isn’t working, but it’s not evaluating your pedagogical decisions, etc. It’s not focusing on what the Serious eLearning Manifesto cares about, for instance. That’s what your learning evaluations do, they check to see if the level 2 is working. But not whether level 2 is affecting level 4, which is what ultimately needs to happen. Yes, we need level 2 to work, but then the rest has to fall in line as well.

My point about orthogonality is that K is evaluating the horizontal, and you’re saying it should address the vertical. That, to me, is like saying we’re going to see if the car runs by ensuring the engine runs. Even if it does, but if the engine isn’t connected through the drivetrain to the wheels, it’s irrelevant. So we do want a working, well-tuned, engine, but we also want a clutch or torque converter, transmission, universal joint, driveshaft, differential, etc. Kirkpatrick looks at the drive train, learning evaluations look at the engine.

We don’t have to come to a shared understanding, but I hope this at least makes my point clear.

 

Will:

Okay readers! Clark and I have fought to a stalemate… He says that the Kirkpatrick model has value because it reminds us to work backward from organizational results. I say the model is fatally flawed because it doesn’t incorporate wisdom about learning. Now it’s your turn to comment. Can you add insights? Please do!

 

Scientists may have found how exercise induces calm–and how it may help people in stressful situations perform better.

Check out this article from the NY Times…

Given that lots of us are stressed these days–and even the relaxed folks have to occasionally make a big stressful presentation, etc.–enabling people to exercise might give them a competitive advantage.

Tonight at the ISPI conference in Orlando, I attended a tribute to Geary Rummler, who recently died after a long and distinguished career in the “Performance-Improvement Field.”

I didn’t know Geary, so I didn’t know how I would react or how long I would stay. I brought my laptop to do emails while I listened. I sat in the back of the cavernous ballroom.

I became transfixed as speaker after speaker who had worked closely with Geary talked about his work and the contributions he made to the field.

The following is my stream of consciousness note-taking with some later annotations. Not worthy of a tribute, but perhaps enough to help me remember some of Geary’s work—and perhaps enough to encourage YOU to take a look at his books and writings.

Notes and Annotations

Entrepreneurial experimentation. Science and sweat. Learning through trial and error.
Creating one-week program on programmed instruction. Didn’t have time to tell, to present objectives, etc. Showed them, had them practice. Curiosity, interested in what did NOT work, not just what DID work. Pre-Testing then Programmed Instruction then Maintenance of Behavior. Annotation: Even way back in the 1960’s and 1970’s someone was thinking about maintaining performance after training, and we are still struggling to get most of the field to do this.

After the initial workshop was developed and deployed, then Management of Behavior Change Workshop. Then General Systems theory workshop. Started small and specific—built up to systems.
During 1960’s Geary and colleagues wouldn’t do training without a thorough front-end needs analysis. 

Annotation: Hmmm. With today’s pressures, many are eschewing FEA.

Geary rebuffed a man who insulted one of his woman colleagues by telling him, “Shut up, she knows more than you do.”

Praxis (a Geary company) had a mission (we didn’t earn that much money speaker said)—to make the world a better place by improving the place where people worked. Annotation:

One of Geary’s former colleagues sang a song in tribute (a tear-inducing moment).

Geary was an engineer. Geary worked with Tom Gilbert. Helped plan Motorola University. Did coaching of functional managers of manufacturing curriculum. One of nice things about Geary is that as a consultant as he learned—he would even tell about the mistakes he made.

Quote from Geary (paraphrased): “Beware of false prophets, the HR people, who would rank and rate you, but don’t really understand the organization.”

Article: “You want performance, not just training.”

Did Situation analysis. Asked these questions: (1) What is happening now? (2) What should be happening?, THEN Define desired outputs. “As-is” “To-Be”

This all become six-sigma, etc. Annotation: Several people said Geary’s work became basis for the Six-Sigma movement, TQM, etc.

Geary said: You’ve got a lot of white space on the org chart you need to manage.

Annotation: People like Geary and his colleagues have been doing very valuable stuff for years (For example, they got cycle time from 17 weeks to 5 days), but why hasn’t this spread? Why hasn’t this performance-based approach gradually knocked-out the dominant training-based approach?

Rummler stuff got repackaged into 6-sigma stuff. Motorola bought license from Geary Rummler’s stuff into 6-sigma and TQM.

Geary’s true legacy: Changed the lens we all look through, moving from training to performance improvement.

Provided a common language:
White space, disconnects, organization as a system, cross-functional processes.

Geary Rummler: Managing the whitespace:

Performance Design Lab (Came out of retirement and started/joined this company).
Geary retired, but had to come back and knew the world didn’t get it and had to get back in the game, forming Performance Design Lab in 2000, where they were focusing on performance management systems (maintaining  improvement after the performance improvement).

Serious Performance Consulting. A Geary Book.

Geary always had to have a vehicle for packaging  his insights into his workshops and his books in ways that would make sense for people.

A speaker said, “He believed that it could be possible to create a prosperous society by construction a good system that will hold successful organizations and generate superior results.”

Two places that Geary touched, who seem to want to use Geary’s work to improve the world. Performance Improvement Institute in Cd. Obregon. Sonora Inst of Tehcnol and norwest of Mexico.

Geary Quote: “We cannot continue working the way we are expecting to get different results.”
Speaker quote (paraphrased): “Geary would share his materials more than anyone I know, I think because he was a learner, he wanted us all to know enough so that he could  discuss with us and we could learn together.”

Drinking alcohol and developing relationships with good discussions was a recurring theme. Many stories about drinks being drunk.

“If you put a good performer in a bad system the system wins every time.” Quote from Geary Rummler.

One speaker, quieted by tears, haltingly spoke about imagining Geary becoming a star in the sky…

Annotation: I really didn’t know that much about Geary’s work, but now I am motivated to learn more. Also, I’m glad I went because it gave me nice perspective on the field, even knowing that this “history” was filtered through the lens of tribute protocol.

Bottom line: I was touched and I’m motivated to learn more. Thanks to ISPI for providing this, for all the speakers (who I apologize for failing to capture their names), and for all the people who came to Orlando especially for the tribute.

Here are two of Geary's most popular books:

Are you an independent consultant or contractor in the workplace learning-and-performance field?

Worried about the economy or energized by it?

There is a lot of anecdotal worry that the economy is hitting the training-and-development field hard, perhaps especially so for independent consultants and contractors.

I decided we ought to gather our own data to see what's really going on.

If you're an independent in our field, take my survey at the link below.

In addition to getting a snapshot of the current situation, the survey will help us look at how 2009 is shaping up, and share strategies we independents are employing to survive/thrive.

I'm also asking whether independents might be interested in forming a group for mutual benefit.

PASS THIS ON TO ALL THE INDEPENDENTS YOU KNOW

PLEASE PASS THE SURVEY URL TO YOUR NETWORK.

Please let
people know about this so we get as wide an audience as possible.
Consider notifying people at both the center and periphery of your
social network so that we get a wider cross section of respondents.
Please also send notifications spread out over time so that we widen
our net as well. I will keep the survey open for two weeks or so (or
longer if responses are still rushing in).

Here is the link to send to others:

http://tinyurl.com/c6pjl9

1. Send to your independent colleagues.
2. Post in groups you belong to.
3. Send to your social-network friends.
4. Post on your blog, twitter, etc.
5. Send to your email newsletter.