Performance Improvement

•

Volume 44

•

Number 8

COMMENTARY

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 moveson to developing schools in Nepal and tending failure-to-thrive babies inRomania, 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 pointout 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 arethe source of the quotations that follow.

Our First Exposure

Tony:

Iran across Gloria’s book

Electronic Performance Support Systems

in early1994. 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 insightson performance-centered design and electronic support have continued to beinvaluable. Had I not been exposed to her insights, I would not have had as muchsuccess helping organizations perform more effectively.

Jay:

The first time I heardGloria’sname was a dozen years ago, when the chair of mycompany showed me a copy of

Electronic Performance Support Systems

(EPSS) andannounced 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, atlong last, technology is catching up with Gloria’svision. Her concept of intrinsicEPSS was the forerunner of workflow learning, and I was delighted when Gloriaaccepted our nomination to become the first fellow of the Workflow Institute. Thefirst 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 morethan designing theapplication for performance in the first place.

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

In Her OwnWords:Gloria Geryon Performance

by Tony O’Driscoll and Jay Cross

www.ispi.org

•

SEPTEMBER 2005Most of our training is compensatory for bad system design,and help desks are the balloon payment on poor systemdesign. If we have to teach people how to use a system, it wasn’tdesigned right in the first place. Why do we have training thatteaches useless jargon? Why should we have to live with errormessages 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. Wemust give up the idea that competence must exist within theperson and expand our view that whenever possible it should bebuilt into the situation. What workers need to do theirjobs—information, rules, and knowledge—is often spread allover the place. Good design puts these things within easyreach 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 arefrustrated with the mismatch between their needs and thetraditional approaches to filling them. The purpose of per-formance support is to help people do what they need to getdone; we need to provide whatever is necessary to generateperformance and learning at the moment of need.Wedon’tneed new technology—we just need new thinking.We must fuse learning and doing to enable immediate per-formance with minimal external support.

OnGetting to the Performance Zone

One of Gloria’skey concepts is the performance zone.

The performance zone is the metaphorical area in whichthings come together. It is the place where people

get it,

where the right things happen, where the employee’sresponse exactly matches the requirements of the situation.In any learning experience, there is always that momentwhere you get it. How do we accelerate people’s arrival at thatmoment? There are two contexts for doing this: in coursesand while working. Courses lack authenticity, as they are sep-arated from the work context. In too many organizations,users arebouncing between multiple systems to get one taskdone. How can we configure the interface layer to structurethe processes and provide in-context learning, because

that

isthe 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 theleast capable of performers, that is, to enable people whodon’tknow what they aredoing to function as if they did.

First Know the Work

About 80% of what people learnto performeffectively happenson the job, yet we continue to dismiss it as informal learning.

People don’tdeal in subjects; they deal in work. The unifyingschema or context for performance-centered design is work.We must learn to look at the reality of people trying to getthrough the work day. We must reflect deeply on the waywork presents itself to the user and build our systems on themetaphors that are connected to the work context itself. Thecontext is the workflow, and the content is what the userneeds 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 thatpeople do. Most of all, we have to be able to sit in thelearner’s chair, to find out how the work comes at him orher. We need to understand what really goes on.We need to put the real truth into our training. Courses arenecessary but not sufficient. We must have a strategy.Architecture is a part of it. Courses are a part of it. But we mustunderstand people, how they learn, how they collaborate, howinquiry teaches, how we learn from observing models.Performance support focuses on work itself, while trainingfocuses on the learning required to do the work. Integratingresources in the workplace is inevitable, and the need isurgent. Filtering resources so people get the tools andresources 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 namethat 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 theyneed at the moment of need, and what form should it be in?

Learning’sNew 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 peoplein 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 tolimit the amount of learning as a precondition to doing.To do this will require that we act not on what we know, but onwhat is known. Wemust 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 futureshould be an extension of our past. What’s wrong with thisscenario is that we areapplying radically different techno-logical alternatives to old frameworks without re-examiningtheir underlying assumptions and structures.If the effort to learn is greater than the time available at themoment of need, you will lose the employee. Instead of making an effort to learn, the employee will make it up.