ISPI's Top Stories of 2012

I received ISPI's Performance Digest for the day, and I was struck by the lack of substance. Indeed, a couple of the stories seem to conflict ("Change Management vs. Change Leadership" and "Rise of the Change Manager"), many are the obvious ("The Best Approach to Training", "Stop Long, Boring Staff Training; Start Short, Social Learning Modules"), others are laments ("Intelligence Lost: The Boomers are Exiting"), and one puts forth a false dichotomy ("Social Media vs. Knowledge Management"). Without trivially casting aside many of the otherwise salient industry issues discussed in the collected articles, I must express displeasure with the terribly short shrift many of the subjects are given. This is hardly indicative of a quality set of articles that ostensibly have moved the industry over the last annum.

But the one I found most thin, is "Will virtual learning kill in-person training?" Nevermind that this question - or rather cliche, at this point - has been put to WLP and HPI professionals ad nauseum for at least the last 15 years, this horribly brief piece puts forth only one positive argument that virtual learning is best, and only one negative argument. Both arguments miss many points, enough to make me question whether the contributors involved were asked to cram as much as they could into a few short paragraphs. This article's inclusion in a year-end roundup is a head-scratcher, when surely there was something else of more value to communicate. The actual answer to the article's question is that neither form is going to disappear at any immediately foreseeable point, both have their uses, and both are more likely to increasingly meet in the middle as technology matures.

The other item that raises my ire today, is the apparent rise in false dichotomies, which pit one paradigm against another, and seemingly always failing to consider whether both may actually be contributing something. Take Change Management vs. Change Leadership and Social Media vs. Knowledge Management for example. This is classic one-or-the-other-ism that really doesn't do the professionals reading any service. Can the industry move away from presenting these often false choices?

Whewww!

So the last two weeks have been quite action-packed for me. Finishing up this quarter's Masters project proved more time consuming than initially expected, and I'm glad I started it a couple weeks early! I had to prepare elearning and classroom instruction modules that complemented each other for a new software application put in place by my client. This was an interesting project in that it really illustrated for me how instructional design as a field is beginning to merge with Human Performance Improvement/Technology (HPI/HPT), as I discussed in a post last month.

My client is in the process of integrating his training team with an application that tracks performance data of individuals and shifts to specific equipment metrics, and aids training personnel in working with their customers on how to best solve performance issues. They are getting a kind of visibility into performance improvement opportunities that my client's training group has not previously had, and the new functionality allows the training team to uncover solutions it had never considered in the past. This is about going beyond training, and getting into other HPI interventions that may be more capable of solving the performance issue.

There's an obvious caveat to the project however, in that training personnel can view individual job performance data. This can lead to sticky situations that can be hard to dial back if the application is misused. It's a good thing though that my client recognizes this and has already forged a partnership with HR and training's stakeholders to put in place rules to guard against misuse of data.

It's been a wonderful project, and a great opportunity to take part in such a significant new development for this client. I heartily thank my client for agreeing to let me help them with this effort, and in turn helping me with my studies and application. And, in the process of completing the project, I was able to test Captivate 4.0 thoroughly enough to do a write-up! I'll be posting that hopefully in the next couple of days. Stay tuned!

Instructional Design and HPI...Cosmic Convergence?

As I continue in my Masters coursework at Capella University, each successive quarter project has increasingly driven home the sense that Instructional Design (ID) and Human Performance Improvement (HPI) are converging. Never has this been more apparent than my project this Q1. I am helping a friend and former manager at a company (who shall remain nameless...research ethics) who is seeing this very same convergence.

His training group has reached an impasse and has been unable to make significant improvements in the behavior of the workforce through training alone. To compound matters, the work environment is extremely dynamic and fast-paced, while having a very (to my eye) myopic focus on performing to benchmarks set by HQ. While benchmarks are not bad things, focusing on those alone will cause an organization to lose focus over the long term. My friend's training group has found itself in the classic struggle of nearly every training organization: How do we quantify and show our value-add to the business?

The problem goes beyond simple ROI measurements of training, and moves further into questions regarding the things that perhaps should be tried that are not. The culture in the environment tells them, in the traditional sense, that no problem can be solved without training. But HPI as a field of study shows that this is not the case. As such, due to the trend I am seeing with my friend's organization, I felt compelled to pose the question to my professor, and to myself, as I continue my studies. Are ID and HPI converging? The answer is certainly not known at this point in time, but there are signs out there, and as practitioners of ID (and later on HPI in my case) it's best I keep my eye out. My professor also sees some cause to think that the two fields are no longer parallel. Here's an abstract for a study I found on this phenomenon after a quick Google-timeout. Stolovitch and Keeps also help keep things in perspective.