COMMENTARY

In Her Own Words:

Gloria Gery on Performance
by Tony O’Driscoll and Jay Cross

F
ortunate are we who have been inspired by a true visionary. Gloria Gery pro-
foundly shaped the beliefs and work practice for both of us. As Gloria moves
on to developing schools in Nepal and tending failure-to-thrive babies in
Romania, we want to acknowledge her work and share a few of her insights.

Gloria has a knack for diving into complicated performance issues only to point
out what should have been obvious to the rest of us with concise, provocative,
and often humorous language. Whenever we heard Gloria speak over the years,
we took notes, and those notes are the source of the quotations that follow.

Our First Exposure

Tony: I ran across Gloria’s book Electronic Performance Support Systems in early
1994. The first 51 pages obliterated all my paradigms regarding the role of train-
ing in organizations. My synapses were rewired, and my mental model of learn-
ing and performance was forever altered. Throughout my career, Gloria’s insights
on performance-centered design and electronic support have continued to be
invaluable. Had I not been exposed to her insights, I would not have had as much
success helping organizations perform more effectively.

Jay: The first time I heard Gloria’s name was a dozen years ago, when the chair of my
company showed me a copy of Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) and
announced that EPSS spelled the death of the training industry as we knew it. Of
course, that didn’t happen. The ideas were right—but ahead of their time. Now, at
long last, technology is catching up with Gloria’s vision. Her concept of intrinsic
EPSS was the forerunner of workflow learning, and I was delighted when Gloria
accepted our nomination to become the first fellow of the Workflow Institute. The
first time I heard Gloria speak, seven years ago, she provided the mantra of my efforts:
“Training will either be strategic or it will be marginalized.”

Now it’s time to hear from Gloria, in her own words. Our comments are itali-
cized; the rest is pure Gloria.

Systems Design, Training, and Performance Support

In her early days at Aetna, Gloria saw workers struggling with arcane, datacen-
tric mainframe systems. The default solution to their frustration was training and
documentation. Training often meant Band-Aids® designed to camouflage poor
interface design. Ironically, the training often cost a lot more than designing the
application for performance in the first place.

Most of our existing systems were designed to function in a paradigm of scarcity, where
each organization unit developed process and applications based on its own history.
This parochial approach to work system design has yielded an increasingly disjointed
and unintuitive work context for the employee.

Performance Improvement • Volume 44 • Number 8 5

Most of our training is compensatory for bad system design,
and help desks are the balloon payment on poor system
design. If we have to teach people how to use a system, it wasn’t
designed right in the first place. Why do we have training that
teaches useless jargon? Why should we have to live with error
messages like “File sharing illegal error”? Look at the evolu-
tion of a program like TurboTax®. Simplify, simplify.
Learning must be reconceived to influence the primary pur-
pose of organization: to perform effectively and efficiently. We
must give up the idea that competence must exist within the
person and expand our view that whenever possible it should
be built into the situation. What workers need to do their
jobs—information, rules, and knowledge—is often spread all
over the place. Good design puts these things within easy
reach and shows how to use them to optimize performance.
The emergence of a new discipline such as electronic per-
formance support often starts when a few people are
frustrated with the mismatch between their needs and the
traditional approaches to filling them. The purpose of per-
formance support is to help people do what they need to get
done; we need to provide whatever is necessary to generate
performance and learning at the moment of need.
We don’t need new technology—we just need new thinking.
We must fuse learning and doing to enable immediate per-
formance with minimal external support.
On Getting to the Performance Zone
One of Gloria’s key concepts is the performance zone.
The performance zone is the metaphorical area in which
things come together. It is the place where people get it,
where the right things happen, where the employee’s
response exactly matches the requirements of the situation.
In any learning experience, there is always that moment
where you get it. How do we accelerate people’s arrival at that
moment? There are two contexts for doing this: in courses
and while working. Courses lack authenticity, as they are sep-
arated from the work context. In too many organizations,
users are bouncing between multiple systems to get one task
done. How can we configure the interface layer to structure
the processes and provide in-context learning, because that is
the teachable moment we are always looking for?
The goal of performance-centered design is to institutional-
ize best practice on an ongoing basis, all the time, by the
least capable of performers, that is, to enable people who
don’t know what they are doing to function as if they did.
First Know the Work
About 80% of what people learn to perform effectively happens
on the job, yet we continue to dismiss it as informal learning.
People don’t deal in subjects; they deal in work. The unifying
schema or context for performance-centered design is work.
6 www.ispi.org • SEPTEMBER 2005
We must learn to look at the reality of people trying to get
through the work day. We must reflect deeply on the way
work presents itself to the user and build our systems on the
metaphors that are connected to the work context itself. The
context is the workflow, and the content is what the user
needs to perform work within that context.
Today our analytical approaches yield a sterilized view of
work, not a real one. We have to understand the work that
people do. Most of all, we have to be able to sit in the
learner’s chair, to find out how the work comes at him or
her. We need to understand what really goes on.
We need to put the real truth into our training. Courses are
necessary but not sufficient. We must have a strategy.
Architecture is a part of it. Courses are a part of it. But we must
understand people, how they learn, how they collaborate, how
inquiry teaches, how we learn from observing models.
Performance support focuses on work itself, while training
focuses on the learning required to do the work. Integrating
resources in the workplace is inevitable, and the need is
urgent. Filtering resources so people get the tools and
resources they need while actively working is the goal.
Work process and roles are the primary filters. The mecha-
nisms vary: portals, performance-centered workflow inter-
faces, enterprise applications, integration projects, and so on,
but what’s important is that the performer be able to name
that tune in one note, to perform in exemplary fashion.
The common thread for the learning and performance sup-
port communities is this: How do we get people what they
need at the moment of need, and what form should it be in?
Learning’s New Role in Enabling Performance
As learning and performance come together to address the
pressing issues of the enterprise, we must challenge our con-
ventional wisdom about how we ply our trade.
We conceive of learning as an event in which we fill people
in advance with enough information to survive on the job.
Instead, we must emphasize learning as an outcome of per-
formance, not a precondition to it, and we must strive to
limit the amount of learning as a precondition to doing.
To do this will require that we act not on what we know, but on
what is known. We must avoid defining the performance prob-
lem too narrowly to tackle what we already know how to do.
We should focus on how we design a job for day one perfor-
mance, not how we leverage technology to automate training.
In our pursuit of solutions we have assumed that our future
should be an extension of our past. What’s wrong with this
scenario is that we are applying radically different techno-
logical alternatives to old frameworks without re-examining
their underlying assumptions and structures.
If the effort to learn is greater than the time available at the
moment of need, you will lose the employee. Instead of
making an effort to learn, the employee will make it up.
We need to leverage technology to enable new learning
structures, not automate training.
We should not default to prior mental models, but instead
give up on the viability of the old point of view. The goal of
establishing day one performance is not hard to do; it is
hard to get done. It will live or die on the political issues
within the organization.
Workflow Learning
Many people have equated EPSS with workflow learning.
While they are certainly kin, they are not twins.
How the context has changed…is changing…will either render
us irrelevant or make us more critical. How can we proceed
to have more leverage in what we do? Workflow is one way
for us to better integrate what we do with people’s lives. The
computer-mediated context is the workflow context. People
are willing to accept less at the moment of need if it is
focused and relevant.
One of the questions I hear is, “How is workflow-based
learning different from performance support?” This is per-
formance support on steroids—magnified, with a much
higher impact. The workflow is the context, the magic filter
through which we will be able to filter content, against
which we compare default tactics. There will always be
instructor-led training, but there will be far less of it than
the workplace learning resources.
Here’s a definition: Workflow is a sequence of activities that
a person has to do to achieve defined desirable goals and
results specific to the condition. Deliverables, solutions,
decisions…. Filters are needed to screen out the irrelevant
and bring to the fore the things that are relevant. The work-
flow is the best default filter for all data. A fusion of learn-
ing and doing is on the way.
Jay: A little while ago, I wrote in my blog that humankind is
awakening to the realization that everything is connected.
The point of learning is to prosper within our chosen com-
munities, to optimize the quality of our connections to our
networks. However, many people have failed to change the
default settings their personal firewalls came with, even
though their factory-installed settings haven’t been
upgraded since one million BC.
Gloria thoughtfully replied, “Almost worse than the
default settings that are millions of years old are the cul-
tural, political, ethnic, and religious settings we were
given in our early lives. They, of course, reflect the biases
of prior generations and, in my experience, no longer fit in
a globalized world. They limit us from more than learning.
They limit us as people interacting as humans with other
people. Our networks must go way beyond the filters that
sift out important other people—or have us judge them by
trivial attributes.”
Performance Improvement
Tony: As we were chatting at the Workflow Symposium,
Gloria commented that she really believed that new tech-
nologies such as second-generation portals and business
process modeling have finally given us the ability to enable
the integrated performance at the workflow layer as she had
had originally envisioned more than 15 years ago.
Thanks to technology, the promise of Gloria’s performance-
centered vision moves ever closer to becoming reality. But the
change management issues are where performance-centered
design will live or die. My own goal is work tirelessly on these
issues to make Gloria Gery’s performance-centered vision the
status quo in creating workware for the on-demand enterprise.
We sincerely hope that Gloria inspires you as she has us.
Note: To sponsor a child in Romania, contact Global Volunteers
at http://www.globalvolunteers.org/1main/romania/children/
romania_children.htm
Author Bios
Tony O’Driscoll is a researcher with IBM’s Almaden
Services Research organization. He conducts
research aimed at advancing IBM’s capability to
deliver value in the services arena. He is a recog-
nized authority in the areas of corporate innovation,
knowledge management, organization learning, e-
business strategy, and change management. He
has in-depth knowledge and extensive experience
in optimizing and managing organizational perfor-
mance, and he has consulted with business leaders around the world on how
to create sustained competitive advantage in an increasingly networked global
economy. He is an active member of the International Society for Performance
Improvement, PDMA, the American Society for Training & Development, and
AHRD [AU: Please spell out PDMA and AHRD]. He has contributed to journals
such as Management Information Sciences Quarterly, Journal of Management
Information System, Performance Improvement Quarterly, and the Journal of
Product and Innovation Management. He has been a keynote presenter, pan-
elist, workshop leader, and facilitator at more than 40 national and international
conferences and symposia. He may be reached at odriscol@us.ibm.com.
Jay Cross is CEO of Internet Time Group and
founder of the Workflow Institute. A thought leader
in learning technology, performance improvement,
and organizational culture, Jay coined the terms
“e-learning” and “workflow learning.” He is CEO of
the 1,800-member Emergent Learning Forum and
is the author of Implementing eLearning. He writes
the “Effectiveness” column for Chief Learning
Officer magazine and is currently writing a book on informal learning.
Thousands of people read his Internet time blog every day. Jay was born in
Hope, Arkansas (in the same room as Bill Clinton), and is a graduate of
Princeton University and Harvard Business School. He and his wife, Uta, live
with two miniature longhaired dachshunds in the hills of Berkeley, California.
He may be reached at jaycross@gmail.com.
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