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International
Society of Performance Improvement Newsletter
May 2003
Instructional
Design, Cognitive Style
by
Rob Foshay, PhD, CPT
Many of the instructional design practices we know and love are based on a solid foundation of behavioral psychology. They are tried and true—we know they work, and we know how to build training with them. But our understanding of how learning occurs has grown considerably in recent years, and as a result, we have been able to gain new insights on questions such as, “how do experts’ thought processes differ from those of novices?” and “how can we help learners to build memory structures which facilitate problem-solving?”
These insights give us some important new strategies for training. One of the most important revolves around the distinction between well- and ill-structured problem solving. Every time you do a task analysis, you are probably mapping well-structured procedures: these are the skills you can flowchart. But, it turns out that these procedures are not representative of the way expert engineers, designers, creative types, and even managers think about their jobs. These people use well-structured procedures, but they use them in the service of inventing a solution for a problem they have not seen before. That is ill-structured problem solving, in which the conditions, the actions, and the desired outcomes are not necessarily specified at the beginning of problem solving. Ill-structured problem solving is what is needed for far transfer, or the ability to solve a somewhat similar problem in an entirely new context. It is the ultimate goal of much training—yet our familiar, tried-and-true design practices don’t tell us much about the distinction, or how to teach ill-structured problem solving.
Cognitive psychology to the rescue! By adding some new instructional design principles to our practice, based on cognitive psychology, we can deal much more effectively with training for ill-structured problem solving. We know some things about how to teach the mental models which the learner modifies and manipulates to solve the problems. We also know some things about how to teach ill-structured problem solving, when there is no single right answer (though there may be lots of wrong ones). And, we know some things about how to build learners’ understanding from the novice level to the expert level—more than repetitive practice is needed. We even have a better understanding of what the learner is telling you when he or she makes a mistake (simply having the learner try again wastes an important instructional opportunity).
So, what are the benefits? More efficient, more transferable training—and perhaps, reduced need for retraining when something in the content changes; deeper understanding; and, new ways to build expertise in the work force, especially for jobs that involve judgment and problem solving.
Rob Foshay, CPT, is a former member of the ISPI Board of Directors. He is Vice President for Instructional Design and Quality Assurance for PLATO Learning, Inc. Rob is a frequent presenter at ISPI conferences and has contributed articles and book chapters to many Society publications. His experience includes more than 25 years in e-learning, as well as academic faculty positions. Rob may be reached at rfoshay@plato.com.
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TrendSpotters:
Future Watch, Featuring Rodger Stotz
by
Carol Haig, CPT and Roger Addison, CPT
This month our guest is Rodger Stotz, CPT, and vice-president/managing consultant at Maritz, Inc. He may be reached at rodger.stotz@maritz.com. Maritz is a global provider of integrated performance improvement, corporate travel management, and marketing research. For the next two to three years, Rodger makes three predictions rooted in the general re-assessment of values and priorities that organizations and their employees have engaged in since 9/11.
Top
Three Predictions
First, Rodger envisions the need for leaders to take an increasingly macro-level
view of the purpose and values of their organizations.
They will look beyond financial health and profitability to determine what their
organizations stand for, and how they can best contribute to society. Second,
the continued connection between the employees’ experience
and their customers’ experience will become more pronounced as organizations see the
value in this relationship and explore ways to maximize it. Third, measurement
and analysis will encompass both hard and soft performance results, seeking key performance indicators and
intangibles such as added value beyond financial measures.
Impact
of These Predictions
In the aftermath of the tech bubble, Enron, and other corporate scandals, the
workforce has become increasingly sensitive to the ethical underpinnings of
their employers. They want to know how their organizations serve the greater
community. In the boardroom, leading-edge executives are not only defining
the purpose of their organization and articulating supporting values, but also
ensuring these values are real. In interviews, job candidates are asking how corporate
values are being lived, and how they are impacting the communities the organizations
serve. Some organizations, for example, focus on charitable activities related
to their purpose and values, typically aligning with a single cause or issue
as part of their branding. One such firm is Avon, a cosmetics company that is
positioned as “The Company for Women” and aligns itself with women’s health.
Organizations are carefully examining the connection between the employee experience and the customer experience. Northwestern University has established the Forum for People, Performance, Management and Measurement to study this phenomenon, also referred to as the service/profit chain. They are investigating how employee behavior influences customer behavior, and how organizations can maximize this relationship for improved results. In most organizations, the human resource (HR) and marketing areas are siloed and frequently work at cross-purposes because they do not share strategies or information. When these groups are more closely aligned with data exchange, joint strategic planning, and shared communication, early research in the UK suggests improved bottom-line results (Explanations from the Marketing/HR Dyad for Market Competitiveness by J. Chimhanzi and R.E. Morgan, The University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK).
Organizations are increasingly interested in measurement and analysis. While ROI (return on investment) remains a focus, VOI (value of investment) is of growing interest as a way to measure intangibles or soft results. The increased desire for data seems to stem from the combination of continuing poor results and ever increasing competitiveness in business, and the reintroduction of the quality challenge, where all processes, procedures, and business actions are scrutinized for continuous improvement. The Forum, mentioned earlier, has just launched a study on internal initiatives, and their impact on business results. They are using live organizational data, which should provide valuable information to organizations seeking to learn more about their own results.
How
Organizations Will Be Different
Organizations already look different due to the decrease in hierarchies and
the increase in span of control. Employees work in dispersed locations or telecommute.
If organizational purpose and value are clearly established and communicated
to employees, then they can draw on these values daily to keep their organization’s
financial success in perspective with its values. We see this in effective branding,
which further defines an organization and ties it to its values. For Southwest
Airlines, for example, a key value is freedom: freedom for customers to fly,
freedom for employees to be themselves within the established company structure.
As organizations make the connection between HR and marketing, HR will become better at making the organization inviting to job candidates and more skilled at demonstrating how the purpose and values impact employees, customers, and the community. In effect, employees will be treated as HR’s internal customers. In turn, marketing will become more sensitive to the fact that workers will be required to deliver on promises the organization has made to customers. HR will help bring systems thinking to marketing.
The VOI will be applied at all organizational levels: to the work processes, the workers’ performance, and the organization’s overall performance. This “value” perspective is broader than just finances or ROI because it looks at both leading and lagging measures of performance and value added. Because much of the value of today’s organizations is not found on the balance sheet, much of what we need to be measuring is beyond the financials—people, processes, and performance—areas of focus for HPT!
Implications
for HPT Work
The leaders of organizations are making it a priority to be aware of trends,
research, and data affecting their operations and those in related fields, knowing
that so many diverse elements impact daily business.
We, as HPT practitioners, are challenged to help grow the use of HPT by making our systems thinking and variety of tools available wherever they may apply in our organizations. We must expand our range from the traditional transactional roles we take in training and HR and show how performance improvement models and techniques can be used to support organizational strategies and improve results. We must take our mental models and translate them to make what we know and do accessible to our clients.
This focus on “intangible measures,” the employee/customer experience, and ensuring that the organization’s purpose and values are embedded in the culture are changing how Maritz views itself and its services. One example of this is Rodger’s effort to explore a VCI, or value creation index, to capture how HPT creates value for an organization.
If we look carefully at Rodger’s predictions, we see that ISPI’s Standards of Performance Technology—focus on results, partner with others, add value at all organizational levels—will have a strong and positive impact on the organizations we serve.
If you have any predictions about the future of HPT that you feel would be of interest to the PerformanceXpress readership, please contact Carol Haig, CPT, at carolhaig@earthlink.net or Roger Addison, CPT, at roger@ispi.org.
Hi,
I’m Joe, and I’m a Certified Performance Technologist!
Or
Hi,
I’m Joe, and I’m one of the most frustrated employees in my organization!
by
Pierre Mourier
Hi, my name is Joe, and I just returned from ISPI’s Annual Conference in Boston. What a fantastic time I had. All the exciting new things I learned, all the new people I met. I was able to rub shoulders with the best in our profession, and through these meetings, I was able to re-affirm my strong belief that performance improvement in organizations is a systemic endeavor. There are no silver bullets. Developing and implementing training programs in isolation cannot work. Implementing process interventions won’t work unless several other key performance levers are moved.
You know, it was so exciting for me to again be with people who think like I think, know what I know, and believe what I believe.
But now I am back at work at “GIGA-Corp.” The first thing I had to attend to, of course, was all the email. Hey, no big deal, but let me ask you a question? Do you feel like I do? Is that familiar feeling of frustration beginning to raise its ugly head?
How is it that what seems so logical when talked about at the Conference is so difficult to implement when we get back in our corporate environments? Maybe I am alone in this, but somehow I don’t think so. Hey, look at the realities. No matter where you turn in the literature regarding implementation of change, failure rates of 70% or more are quoted. Just think about the meaning of that number for a moment. The members of ISPI are all change agents and deeply involved in change. Yet 70%-75% of the efforts we (maybe ISPI members have a higher success rate than everyone else) engage in fail. While most of us know what it takes to effect lasting, performance-related change in our organizations, this is the result. How frustrating!
We know it is not enough to train people. We must also enable these people with a performance system in which they are afforded the opportunity to exhibit and be rewarded for exhibiting newly learned skills. There must be an alignment on expectations in the organization. People must have the tools to perform as expected and the consequences of performance must be aligned with the same expectations (you get what you reward). I know this; you know this. But…
Here is my problem. I don’t feel executives in our organizations are willing to truly recognize, or at least behave in a manner, that is consistent with a systemic vision of change.
Help me! Why is this? Are we, the Performance Technologists, special? No! Are our executives dumb? No! Well, what is it then? I think it is a failure on our part in getting the right amount of respect! Respect that translates into executive behavior. For example, when we suggest something, executives listen and do as we ask.
I don’t think executives in our organizations respect our opinions. They still think of us as trainers. We earn respect at the tactical level by doing what is expected of us so that we can earn a seat at the strategic level where we can do what really needs to be done.
So, here is my call to ISPI and other members of our profession. Help us get the respect we deserve. How can ISPI do this? I think we are on our way. The Certification program definitely helps, but we need more. I have a few ideas, but I would love to start a Society-wide dialogue on this topic. Therefore, I challenge you to respond. What are your thoughts? Am I right about this need? Am I alone?
You can send your comments to JOECPT@stractics.com. I will then summarize the remarks for a future article in PerformanceXpress. If this challenge generates enough discussion, we will research another venue for continuing the dialogue.
Pierre Mourier is the Founder and President of Stractics Group, Inc., a management consulting firm with offices in New York and Hong Kong, dedicated to helping clients achieve measurable performance improvements in areas such as customer satisfaction, productivity, quality, and cycle-time. He is the co-author with Martin Smith of the award-winning book, Conquering Organizational Change: How to Succeed Where Most Companies Fail (CEP Press, 2001), and his latest book Conquering Performance Optimization will be published in 2004. Pierre is a Board Member of ISPI for 2003-2005.
NOTE:
While Pierre Mourier was recently elected to be a member of the ISPI Board of
Directors, the opinion above is entirely his own and does not represent the
opinion of the Board and is not written to be regarded as such.
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From
the Board: A Smooth Segue into the New Year
by
Guy W. Wallace, CPT
As the incoming president of ISPI, I want to share with you some highlights from the Annual Spring Conference just held in April, introduce you to the new Board of Directors, and give you a “heads up” regarding what I see as the Board’s foci for the next year.
The attendance at the conference in Boston was up 15% over last year—great news in these trying economic times! I typically ask attendees at the Conference about their experience as the event progresses, and this year the feedback was almost always exceptional. Kudos to the presenters, to Michelle Halprin and her team (more than 150 volunteers help “make this happen”), and also to the entire ISPI staff for their continued superior performance!
Mark your calendar to attend ISPI’s Fall Conference in Chicago, September 17-20, focused on Performance-Based Instructional Systems Design, the ISPI Europe Conference in Paris, September 25-27, or the program being planned for Capetown, South Africa, October 9-10. And, I hope to see you presenting and/or attending ISPI’s 2004 Annual Performance Improvement Conference & Exposition in Tampa, April 19-23, 2004. Make your plans to submit, present, or attend now.
New Board members Barbara Gough, Pierre Mourier, Jim Pershing, and incoming President-elect Don Tosti joined Board holdovers Clare Carey, Jeanne Farrington, Executive Director Rick Battaglia, and me on stage during the Annual Conference’s Closing Banquet, and then the next day for a quick, one-day Board of Directors meeting intended to get us all introduced to each other and orient the new members to the Director’s “job.”
We had already learned during the Conference that Barbara Gough was the 2003 recipient of ISPI’s Distinguished Service Award, and Don Tosti was the recipient of the Gilbert Award. In addition, we learned that Pierre Mourier, a Dane who has also lived in the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and Italy to name a few, speaks seven languages including Swahili. It came in handy when working as a pilot giving Safari tours by air. Jim Pershing has a passion for the research orientation and technology of HPT, and as the recent editor of Performance Improvement journal read more than 1,700 articles during his four-year term.
Don presented several models to help orient the entire Board to our challenge of staying “strategic versus tactical” as we explore the needs and alternatives in moving our professional home forward to better meeting the needs of our current and future members.
Clare helped us revisit and recalibrate our Board Norms, and Jeanne structured a mini-agenda and process for each topic on our agenda. Rick is our living memory and connection to the good work and intentions of past Boards. He is also responsible for all the objectives the Board establishes each year that do not get directed to our Committees and Task Forces.
What follows? Four three-day Board meetings and a final one-day meeting just before the Tampa Conference. As I see it, the focus of each of those three-day meetings is: Strategic Planning for the near-term future, followed by future Committee/Task Force/Staff Alignment, followed by future Budget Alignment, followed by Lessons Learned and Planning for Continuous Improvement.
There are, of course, many other agenda items that will be brought to our attention. We will address those in light of our strategic focus and current resource capacity. This year remains an Austerity Year. We will move forward and put our limited resources into CPT marketing and supporting our chapters and our non-North American growth initiatives. Currently, four members of the ISPI Board of Directors have their CPT.
The Board will also oversee the completion of Phase 3 and 4 of a Presidential Initiative Task Force started last year to Clarify the HPT Value Proposition. The initial focus is not on marketing statements, but is on the very definition of HPT using “technology domains” or “divisions” to frame HPT’s components. We will build on our past and catch up to the evolution that has taken place as we have moved in the past 41 years from Programmed Instruction to Performance-based Instruction to a more holistic set of concepts, models, methods, tools, and techniques that produce measured results that add value.
The complete story behind this initiative is told on the pages of the February 2003 issue of Performance Improvement journal, available on our Society’s website. Click here to review the issue.
And, if you haven’t already read ISPI’s 2002 Year in Review, you might want to download a copy today. It is a great reflection on our accomplishments over the past year.
Please feel free to share your questions, comments, or concerns with me or any other member of the Board of Directors. We are here to serve the membership. Cheers!
USAID Seeks PI Professionals
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will be advertising a Request for Applications for a five year $150 million global reproductive health/family planning (RH/FP) service delivery cooperative agreement called ACQUIRE. The objectives of this activity are to increase access to RH/FP services; improve performance of service delivery providers; and strengthen the environment for RH/FP service delivery. New partnerships among organizations are encouraged. For more information about USAID global health programs, visit http://www.usaid.gov/pop_health. Interested parties may view the RFA at www.Fedgrants.gov in early May.
Readers
Respond: What Works for Me
by Mark Munley
Every month your colleagues will discuss their “tools of the trade.” Our focus will be on providing interesting and useful job aids that will help you be a more effective practitioner of performance technology. For additional job aids and other useful information, visit ISPI’s 99 Seconds Online.
This month I talked with Mark Wood (MW). Mark is a consultant, speaker, and writer specializing in organizational effectiveness, leadership, culture, and compensation. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he may be reached at markwoodonline@earthlink.net.
MM: What is the Job Aid for Distilling Multiple, Disparate Issues?
MW: I use it as a tool for finding common denominators among multiple issues that do not seem to be or look related to one another.
MM: Who might be interested in using this tool?
MW: People who are the primary facilitators of a discussion around trying to understand the essence or root cause of a situation.
