Performance Improvement
By Elham Arabi, PhD
I’m in awe of the abundance of great research and works of experts who have tried to guide us toward doing the right thing in learning design and performance improvement, yet we still overlook them.
Take Thomas Gilbert’s viewpoint on Teleonomics (Greek word meaning the laws’ of ends), for instance. Years ago, he introduced us to performance engineering and measuring human competence, which begins by focusing on the results or products of behavior and other events.
Many of us tend to use checklists or ratings and scores as the measures, while we should be looking at the percentages of sold items, improved quality of service, reduced human errors, more lives saved and so on. We should define and measure results, don’t you agree?
In other words, we should be able to quantify accomplishments not behavior. The question that both we and our SMEs need to ask when building the performance assessments and tests is “what is the output (accomplishment) of the behavior that we’re aiming our learners to achieve”? That end or result in mind should inform us on how we design our learning programs and develop our assessments and tests.
And the important question before starting with training is to find out whether the problem (identified by stakeholders) can be solved by training. Is the problem in the work environment (such as team dynamic, communication, work stress, inefficient processes) or in the behavior repertory?