Performance Improvement

Federal Computer Week (FCW) reports how the US Army is implementing knowledge management at the operational and tactical level. Here is a prime example:

In this particular case, Iraqi insurgents placed an IED [improvised explosive device] behind a poster with anti-American slogans. A soldier noticed that the poster looked different from others he had observed, so he entered information about the suspicious sighting into BCKS. A threaded discussion developed online while specialists evaluated the potential threat. When they confirmed the soldier’s suspicions, the Army sent a message via the system to alert other units about the insurgents’ new method of concealing IEDs.

The article goes on to discuss the details of knowledge management activities that enable junior officers to share information based on the current operational reality. However, it seems that the Army hierarchy is not learning as quickly as the grass-roots:

The Army is a hierarchical institution in which a natural tension exists between junior officers and the Army brass, who want junior officers to follow Army doctrine to the letter. But junior officers who have been deployed in Iraq often feel that doctrine is out-of-date and that they know best based on their experiences on the battlefield.

A grass-roots movement to transform the service from the bottom-up has created tremendously valuable communities of practice, but Army doctrine has been slow to adapt.

There is a similar tension in large organisations in the civilian world. I recently tried to work with a large company in responding to a government Request for Proposals (RFP). Being outside the company, I knew who at the company had previous experience with similar projects, while the employees with whom we were working did not. I also knew the strategic value of this RFP, which was information not easily available to the employees with whom we were working. It seemed as if the company’s structure was designed to thwart us as we tried to develop a proposal.

In the end, it took over two weeks to get the information to the person who would have been interested and authorised to write a proposal, but by then it was too late. We didn’t respond to the RFP because it took too long to get the information up the chain of command. I wonder how many other opportunities have been lost by the company this year?

At some point in the future we will realise that our hierarchical organisational structures are outdated and do not work when you have cheap and easy communications and a relatively free flow of information. That will not happen until businesses experience great pain and, in the Army’s case, not until more soldiers have died.

Last week I mentioned a few communication tools that I learned how to use in the Army. One of these is the Estimate, which is a problem-solving tool. As young officers, we were constantly told to “estimate the situation and never situate the estimate”. In many cases, when training is prescribed for a work performance issue, it is a case of situating the estimate. I can think of two recent examples in my own business experience.

In one case, e-learning was prescribed to address the performance needs of nurses changing to a new nursing care methodology. In that instance, I was able to convince the client that a quick performance analysis could be used to confirm the assumption that e-learning was the solution. As a result of the analysis, we changed the intervention to the development of an online diagramming tool, because we determined that nursing staff already had 80% of the necessary skills and knowledge, but they didn’t know how to use the new diagramming and reporting procedures. The initial e-learning program was greatly reduced.

In another case, training was prescribed in order to get staff up to date with a new organisation-wide policy. Each person received an average of 17 days classroom training. As an observer for part of the training, I would estimate that all of the training could have been done in less than a week, had the new procedures and some job aids been first developed. The total cost of training approached millions of dollars, plus the cost of missed work.

Recently, David Maister stated that training is often prescribed in the “hope” that performance can be improved, when a few pointed questions might better get to the root of the issue:

The correct process would be to sit top management down, ask: What are people not doing that we want them to be doing? – and then figuring out a complete sequence of actions to address the questions  – how do we actually get people to change their behavior? What measurements need to change? – what behaviors by top management need to change to convince people that the new behaviors are really required, not just encouraged? – what has to happen before the training sessions to bring about the change? What has to be in place the very day they finish?

A more detailed process is shown below. It shows that training only works in certain circumstances and that there are a number of other factors to look at first; such as barriers to performance and mismatched rewards & consequences.

A macro view of this process is that triage (sorting out priorities) should initiate the process, followed by a diagnosis (analysis), which can be as short as Maister’s questions, before prescribing some kind of treatment which may or may not include training. Using this method, I continue what my instructors told me many years ago – don’t situate the estimate.

Finally, here’s a job aid that I use in determining what the causes to performance problems may be:

• Causes, Enablers and Obstacles:
  • Question the assumptions and potential solutions.
  • What is causing the problem?
  • What will prevent a solution?
  • What will make a solution easier?
• Focus on Key Sources:
  • Find and focus on the people who are close to the problem and have perspective on the issues. Don’t try and reach everyone, especially in an initial performance analysis.
  • Focus on facts and results
• Look for data, through observations, records, experiences:
  • What evidence is there?
  • Is it consistent?
  • What does it tell us?
  • Is there more?

While listening to the radio the other day, the person being interviewed spoke about the need for training for those responsible for ensuring clean water in many remote Canadian communities. Now, I’m not going to say that training is not required, but making the leap from a performance issue (lack of skills, abilities, knowledge; lack of access to appropriate data and resources; etc) directly to training as the only solution, is the wrong approach and the most costly. As a taxpayer, I don’t want government to slap training band-aids on any problem that involves work performance. Some barriers to performance that are often overlooked when prescribing training include:

• Unclear expectations (such as policies & guidelines);
• Inadequate resources;
• Unclear performance measures;
• Rewards and consequences not directly linked to the desired performance.

In some cases, these barriers could be addressed and there would be no further requirement for training. Where there is a genuine lack of skills and knowledge, training may be required, but it should only be in cases where the other barriers to performance have been addressed. A trained worker, without the right resources and with unclear expectations, will still not perform up to the desired standard, and the drinking water supply may still be in danger.

I have noticed that many large organisations have this tendency to slap on the training band-aid once any issue has been labelled a human performance issue. Training that is not directly related to performance wastes time, bores workers and costs money. Here is a general diagram of the high level process of performance analysis. These posts, and the diagrams, are Creative Commons licensed, so go ahead and use them. You might even save some money.

The opening session at the CSTD Knowledge Exchange in Toronto this week was by Dana Gaines Robinson on the subject of Strategic Business Partnering. This is a new term for me and at the end of the session my impression was that SBP is a new buzz-word for human performance technology, but with an emphasis on strategy. The words strategy and tactics were liberally sprinkled through her session.

This  reminded me of my +20 years in the military when strategy and tactics were my main work disciplines and got me to wondering why many in the learning field use military terms to describe their work. Gaines Robinson used another term that did not sit well with me – it is that one should “own the client relationship”. When I think of a relationship, the last thing that comes to mind is ownership. Does this kind of terminology frame the discussion in a certain way? Does it influence how we think about our profession? Anyway, it was good for me to listen to a presentation that raised these issues.

The strategic, or high level, theme was a thread throughout the conference. Larry Murphy, an attendee and past colleague, described our field as having two kinds of people, forest people and tree people. Some can see the forest and some have to focus on each individual tree. In Strategic Business Partnering I think that we’re focusing on too small of a forest. In SBP, the performance consultant is supposed to partner with the client and look at the next 1-5 years from the client’s perspective.

I prefer Roger Kaufman’s organisational elements model where he urges us to look at the Mega (societal) the Macro (organisational) and Micro (individual & group) levels in strategic planning. A focus on the Mega means taking an ethical, moral and value-based stand. This is the really big picture, not just the business microcosm. A Mega perspective to me means that you don’t try to maximize value for your clients’ profits if they are acting like Enron execs. This thought stayed in my mind through the day, but by Tuesday evening there were some answers, and more questions.

Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, presented the post-dinner speech. In his articulate and engaging way he laid out the enormous humanitarian disaster that is attacking 70 million people today. He described in case after case the spread of the disease and its effects, especially on women. After moving many in the audience to tears, Mr Lewis described what we could do. With his global  vision, he proposed that individuals and groups of learning professionals in Canada could go to Africa and help to retrain a population that has almost no teachers or trainers.

The need is great and even one person training a small group on basic skills, that we take for granted, would have an impact. When the head of a household is only 8 years old (because all of the adults are dead) there are a lot of skills and knowledge that he or she will need to succeed in life. The suggestion was that the training & development community here could start a real knowledge transfer to Africa.

The next morning, the CSTD board created a committee to begin a process of working with the Stephen Lewis Foundation in order to determine how CSTD can help an orphaned generation in Africa to learn essential skills. Stephen Lewis has shown how the strategic and the tactical levels can be aligned, but within a much larger humanitarian (mega) vision. More information on this initiative will be made available on the CSTD website.