What's performance improvement?  How is it different to training? Why is training sometimes the wrong solution? What's the "Hold a Gun to Your Head Test"?   What's the performance improvement conference in Sydney in September all about? Who are the keynote speakers? We speak with Harvey Feldstein to find out.

Harvey Feldstein is an internationally recognized speaker, author, and consultant in the areas of training, learning, and performance. Harvey is also the Director of the Centre for Learning Innovation in Sydney and a long standing member of the International Society for Performance Improvement.

Marie:  I'm talking to Harvey Feldstein who is President of the Sydney chapter of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI).  So welcome to LearnScope Harvey!

Harvey:  Thank you, Marie.

Marie:  I understand there's an exciting conference coming up about performance improvement here in Sydney.  Perhaps we could start off by talking about what performance improvement is.

Harvey:  Great question!  Marie the ISPI or the International Society for Performance Improvement is a fairly large international organization.  It's been around for about forty years I think now. It was founded by some very brilliant behaviourists in the States, who were actually students of Skinner - BF Skinner. They started thinking Well gee, I wonder how you could use some of Skinner's knowledge and apply it to behaviour in the workplace.  And that was how it began.  It was developed into a tremendous body of knowledge and practice which focuses on using a variety of interventions to create performance improvement in work environments. 

Now the distinction between a performance improvement intervention and a training intervention is the difference between chalk and cheese for those of us who are the aficionados of the performance side of life.  And the best way I can describe it is that I can teach you… I can train you how to lose weight in about 30 seconds. And there's no-one who doesn't know how to do it.

I can train you how to do all kinds of things in a very, very short amount of time.  But that really isn't why - you really wouldn't know how to lose weight, because for school learning where you've got to pass a test on it.  If you could pass a test on weight loss that probably wouldn't be one's intention. 

What you'll probably want to do if you are interested in studying weight loss, you'll probably want to lose weight.  Now performance improvement is about losing weight.  It's not about learning about diets.  If it turns out Marie, that you came to me and said Look, I'd really love to learn about losing weight and I interviewed you and it turned out that you believe that eating ice cream was what you needed to do and chips! I would say what we have there is a training problem because Marie just doesn't know how to do this.  She should be exercising and eating celery.  Yet she thinks chips and eating ice cream - obviously I know what the problem is.

We'll make an intervention that will hopefully solve the problem.  We'll train you about calories and diet and all those things.  Most people don't make that error.

Marie:  So it's got a broader scope than training?

Harvey:  Well the objective of a performance improvement is the accomplishment of a worthy goal.  The accomplishment of some worthy goal - worthy objective that you care about.  That's what it's about.  Now if your objective in an intervention is simply to be able to pass a test, then that could be what we focus on.  We'll give you some interesting information.  But if your objective is actually to shift the way you do something, to create a better outcome, or a better result, then we'd have to scratch way below the surface, because in the performance improvement model, we would begin to say: Well, why isn't the person performing this way?

One of grandfathers of this field is a gentleman named Bob Mager and famous for what is sometimes referred to as Bob Mager's Hold the Gun to Their Head Test.

If you can hold a gun to their head and they can do the new behaviour, then it's not a learning problem - we were all taught that by Bob Mager at one point.  So if we use the dieting example if I can hold the gun to the head and you can diet, then it's not a learning problem, because you know how to do it.  There's something else we would need to figure out.

If it's a customer service problem and we say Well look, let's train people in customer service and we teach them how to to customer service and we teach them how to be kind and empathetic.  You know what I think? They already know that.  They know how to be kind and empathetic - some don't.  But most people already know how to do that.  That's not the reason they are not delivering good customer service.

In performance improvement intervention, we would begin with what we call up-front analysis and instead of saying Let's train them, we would try to establish what the gap is between the desired behaviour and the current behaviour. And then we would try to figure out what's causing that.  And we would use a systematic approach to try to discover that. 

The notion would be that giving people training is of really little value if they already know what you are training them in and in an awful lot of cases, they already do know.

Marie:  So you think that the whole concept of performance improvement is a challenge for the vocational education and training system?

Harvey:  Oh I think it is a tremendous challenge.  It's probably a more salient challenge in the corporate world, because what often happens in the corporate world is that training is often looked on as a kind of a panacea.  You know: Oh we've got a problem, let's send them to training. 

Often times what happens … I would guess … is that in the vocational world people get sent to things.  I remember a wonderful story where someone came to our training centre.  We have a training centre years and years ago in teaching people how to use computers.

A guy showed up on their front door and said: I'm here for the computer training. And I said:  Well that's great, but we have 12 classes running, so which one?
And he said:  Well I don't know.  They sent me to the computer training.

So we worked it out. We said:  Do you use spreadsheets or word processing or are you using databases?  Are you a Project Manager?  What are you doing?

He said: Well I do some of all of that.

Eventually I said:  Well on your computer, is there like an emblem of a small piece of fruit or no fruit?

You know because that's where he was.  He had no idea and that I can tell you in advance, that that was a wasted day.

Marie:  So what would he have needed instead of training?

Harvey:  Well, he probably needed a different type of training.  It had been a horrible assessment upfront. People had not really understood what his problem was and the solution that he was being given was wrong.  We were giving skills training.  He needed a very broad background.  He needed to now what he was going to do.  What we've often suggested is to do is not a full performance improvement intervention, at least you can follow some rules that would suggest that the person would know what they're going to do with what they've learned and how they're going to apply it.  If they apply it, what would  the outcomes be that would be worthy and how do we know they've happened.  Those are the kind of bedrocks we would build around a training program, but beyond that, we would try to figure out if it was a knowledge problem anyway.

Marie:  So it looks like training is an important component of performance improvement, but..

Harvey:  Can be…

Marie:  But it's a much broader concept?

Harvey:  Oh it's much broader.  You know another one of Bob Mager's famous sayings that many people would have heard is If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And if the only solution that we know is to teach people things, then everything looks like a learning problem and being trainers or being people who are in the field, guess what we think.  Would we rather have work, or would we rather not have work?

I was just at a dentist's office and guess what he discovered?  He didn't discover that I need psychological help.  He discovered that I needed - guess what - dental help!

What human performance technology says is that maybe they don't need training. Maybe they need something else.  Maybe they need more incentives.  Maybe they need a raise. Maybe they need better information about what's expected of them.  Maybe they need a boss who has a different approach.  Maybe they need some time off.  Maybe they need a manual.  May be they need… We don't know.  So you go into a human performance technology intervention with the notion that I don't know what they need.  But you clearly define the objective and the outcome …this notion of this worthy outcome.

Marie:  And that leads in very nicely to the topic for your conference which is Pathways to Performance.  Can you tell us a bit more about that conference Harvey?

Harvey:  I'd love to.  The conference is in September 9 -12 and it will be at the ANA Grand Hotel in Sydney.  We have a line up of speakers that we think is absolutely unparalleled. 

Marie:  Tell me about who they are as they seem to be very top notch people.

Harvey:  Well we have three keynotes.  One is Elliott Masie who has served on a number of Presidential commissions in the States in learning with a specialty in e-learning.

We have Thiagi who in my book is probably the world's expert in games and simulations.

And we have Allison Rossett who is a professor of educational technology at San Diego State University and a really a seminal thinker in this area of assessment and how assessment and performance plays out in the e-learning world. 

So those are our three keynotes, so in addition to that, we have some fabulous Australian speakers as well.  Stephanie Burns is going to be joining us.  We have some excellent folks from our organization.  A woman named Dr Sylvie Vanesse - who has been in the ISPS for years and years and years - and I will be running a two part workshop on Introduction to Human Technology.  We're going to have some excellent folks on coaching and mentoring.

All that however with kind of a slant and flavour of performance interventions rather than just training interventions. 

Marie:  So it sounds like it's a good overview for people who are interested in performance improvement, and also it sounds like it has a very practical bent as well. 

Harvey:  Very much and there's a bit of a lean.  If you wanted to say which tracks are we leaning towards, it's weighted to the e-learning side, since e-learning is such a huge issue.  And of course in the e-learning world, since it is if I might say in its infancy, we tend to spend a great deal of our time thinking about our deliverables, rather than the worthy objectives of our clients - or our victims as the case may be.

So you know, I've seen magnificent programs that people would get into and say WOW how gorgeous or how beautiful or how wonderful.  I'm looking at some stuff right now…there is almost this notion in the media world… the people who carry all of these broadbands… that what we're talking about is movies!  They think it's movies.  They think it's video games and movies.  And I fear the direction here could become outrageously commercial and I believe we are at the crossroads.

We have this brilliant opportunity to shape the media.  If we do it right, we're going to end up with channels that create a democratized way of learning. If we don't do it carefully, we're going to end up with Network internets.  Networks that look like the channels of those who already own the communication will own the next.

We don't want that.  We believe that the Internet is one of those areas.  If we think about it properly, and we start structuring our learning properly, like the Net*Working conference.   It's a place where learning can be democratized and distributed.  It's a place almost anyone can be both a learner and a presenter in the same 15 minutes.  We are working with some models where we are getting people who begin to learn in virtual classrooms  to be presenters in virtual classrooms within days, because not only are they someone who needs to learn A, but there is someone who can teach B, C and D.  So I'm looking at the e-learning world as an opportunity for us to find places where this massive network of almost informal help where people can find those who teach them.  So that's another theme that is coming out in the conference.

Marie:  So it seems that that conference has got a lot of diversity and would appeal to a broad range of people within vocational education and training.

Harvey:  I believe it would yeah! And if people want more details, am I allowed to tell you where to look?

There is a website:  www.ispisydney.org.au

The most up-to-date information on speakers and registration will be right there.

Marie:  Great  Harvey.  It sounds like quite an exciting conference and I'm sure that a lot of people who are listening to us today will be very interested in attending.

Harvey:  I didn't mention that one of our speakers will be our hostess here..Marie Jasinski.  Marie will be speaking as well.  And she will be talking about something I can't even remember the word… RAMES?

Marie:  Yes

Harvey:  Tell me what's a RAME?

Marie:  That's quite intriguing … you'll have to come to the conference to find out.

Harvey:  Right! I'll have to find out what is a RAME? 

Marie:  Thank you very much Harvey for sharing your expertise on the concept of performance improvement and to let us know this conference is on.  It sounds like an exciting one and I'm sure a lot of people will be interested to attend.

Harvey:  You're very welcome and I look forward to seeing lots of you at the conference

Marie:  Thanks Harvey

Harvey:  Bye now.