Part 4 of Different on Monday: Training for Business Performance, an 8-part series on why Improv-Based Trainers must focus on the workplace applications of their training so they can better set up learners for success.
Affective to Cognitive: Switching Gears
So far, in this Different on Monday series of blog posts, I’ve shared stories from my life to help you feel differently, or at least, more intensely, about the primacy of improving your learners’ performance back at work. This is an example of Affective Learning, one of the three Domains of Learning: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor, or simply put: thinking, feeling, and doing. I’ll touch briefly on the first two in this post, but if you’re fascinated by any of this, I would recommend the following post by Leslie Owen Wilson, Ph.D.
To save you from the embarrassment I felt when I made a similar mistake, let me make clear that I do not mean effective learning. We try to make all learning effective. In Affective Learning, we teach learners to feel differently about something. I wanted you to feel differently about performance. When you design training, I want you staying up at night asking yourself:
“Are we making a measurable difference for learners back at work?”
Alternatively, my next few posts will focus on Cognitive Learning: working with ideas, facts, information, to help you think more effectively about your role as an Improv-Based Trainer, and furthermore, as a Talent Developer. A helpful tool in cognitive learning is sharing a mental model and then populating it with relative content. If you do it right, the content sticks to the model and the model sticks to the learner. We’re looking for a model that answers the question:
What is the larger performance environment around a learner and how might it influence their ability to apply their learning effectively?
The model I recommend is the Human Performance System, found in Improving Performance by Geary Rummler and Alan Brache, who we encountered in Part 2 of this series. Before I explain it, I’d like to make a pitch for why learning some of this often-dry, business-y stuff is worth your time.
Talking the Talk
I believe understanding these concepts and vocabulary changes your orientation to the project and client, and will help you actually deliver more value with your training solutions. However, I also want to familiarize you with established models like RummlerBrache® because it could help you “sound the part” of an informed talent development professional. That’s not to say you should drown your client in buzzwords. In acting terms, think of these concepts more as your subtext. They should influence and motivate more nuanced questioning on your part, but largely stay underneath the surface.
Being equipped with these concepts and language help disrupt the stereotype of “the fun trainer.” Yes, Improv-Based Trainers are almost always more entertaining to learn from than traditional trainers, but that should never allow our clients to discount us as fluffy, foundationless, or “nice-to-have not need-to-have.” Still, new clients often have a bit of titillation over hiring an improviser to do their training.
“I know we could have used one of our same old training vendors for this, but I hired an improv person!”
“Oh, Helen, you’re a pill! Wait ’til I tell Kenneth!”
It’s thrilling for people in talent development to actually do something outside the box after being told to think outside of it for the last fifty years. However, that same thrill is why many clients keep their applied improvisation vendors playing in a pretty small sandbox.
“You just do the fun teambuilding / communication skills kinda’ stuff; we have other vendors for our real training.”
We do real training. We improve performance. So let’s learn the language relevant to those worlds, even if we never actually use it verbatim with a client.
Back to Rummler and Brache: Performance as a System
There’s a reason I keep coming back to these two. Rummler and Brache turned the idea of traditional hierarchal organizations on its head (or really, its side) and started looking at organizations as an interlocking network of systems. Organizations are people-driven machines, and Rummler and Brache drew a new, revolutionary blueprint for how to conceive, build, and improve those machines. Go to their website to check out their articles and some free tools.
Most relevant to our needs, Rummler and Brache help us understand how a worker performs by placing them at the center of a system, what they call the “Human Performance System” (2013, p.69). We can then understand how to affect the worker’s performance by identifying how the worker acts on the larger organization and how that organization works on them.
In their terms, to understand why a worker—as Rummler and Brache say, “a performer”—does what they do and does it how they do it, you have to appreciate the Inputs, Outputs, Consequences, and Feedback that affect them. This is all from Chapter 5 of Improving Performance. I certainly recommend it, but it is not an easy read. So, I’ll share in this blog post what is most relevant to verifying the learner’s performance environment with your client. Here’s a brief introduction to these five forces, the fifth, of course, being the worker (or performer) themselves.
Inputs
Anything that acts on the performer. This includes both what defines their work (directives from management, job description, etc.) and what enables their work (raw materials, tools, job aids, etc.) The required inputs are necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) for performance. For example, to reconcile your financials each month, your bookkeeper probably needs a computer, access to your Quickbooks® file, and, of course, you telling them that you’ll pay them if they do. That alone, however, doesn’t mean they will. (See Consequences and Feedback for the “will” part.)
Outputs
So where’s my Quickbooks reconciliation? Outputs include all a worker contributes back to the organization. It may seem cold, but the worker’s contribution and how that intersects with what the organization actually needs and wants determines their survival and potential for advancement. Want to help workers? Help them provide the right outputs, done the right way.
Performer
Of course, we must consider this living, breathing, human being who sometimes feels trapped in between inputs and outputs, endlessly converting the former into the latter. We must consider that person’s abilities, motivations, needs, culture, and hopefully their essential difference from any other person who was dropped in that role.
From my example, does my bookkeeper know how to use Quickbooks? And, considering technology, do they know how to use my edition of Quickbooks? Do they work well without oversight? Are they able to focus on work or are they overwhelmed by other competing priorities, both personal and professional? As in the Call Center example from Part 3, do they feel they can achieve the new priority you’re demanding without being punished because of how it would affect a past priority.
As we’ll see in the next post, there are two factors within the performer which affect their success The Human Performance System. The questions we ask our client about these factors can be very helpful to designing effective instruction.
Consequences
There’s no better way to explain this then the authors did themselves: “Consequences are the positive and negative effects that performers experience when they produce an output” (2013, p.64) It can be as innocuous as a perfunctory “hey, good job” e-mail, or as formal and structured as a termination, but if it happens to the worker in response to an output, it’s a consequence.
I would throw in that managers don’t necessarily mean to effect a consequence, but the worker may still perceive one. If a worker is taking their break and the boss walks by, sees the worker relaxing, but then slams the door on their way past, the worker probably perceived a consequence for their output. The boss could have just been mad at something else, but the worker now resents what they perceive as a consequence they endured for taking a break that was promised them.
Feedback
Feedback tells the worker what the organization thinks about their outputs. I find it confusing to try to draw hard line between consequences and feedback, since most workers infer feedback from their perceived consequences (as above), whether intended by or not by management. But the authors are careful to use the word “information” in their definition, and their examples focus on literal mechanisms for receiving communication about ones performance, such as: coaching from a manager, results of a customer feedback survey, advice from peers, etc.
It’s useful here to take page from Stephen Covey and his idea of natural vs. social/artificial consequences (1989, p. 90-91). The feedback examples I gave above are essentially “artificial.” They were applied by an individual to the situation; i.e. someone else chose to affect the worker. The worker will then evaluate the feedback not only on its own merits, but based on the trust, regard, and/or fear they have for the source.
Whereas, there are also what I would call “natural feedback loops,” where the conscious worker is receiving input directly from their own observation, rather than as interpreted by someone else. This could be sales figures, error messages, or, for a line worker, rejected parts. While it may take some coaching to get a given worker to pay attention to these kinds of feedback, I find them very valuable because the worker can engage with this feedback without the baggage of feeling judged or playing politics, etc.
For Rummler and Brache, the key element for feedback is how well it joins the performer’s other inputs to affect their performance. Indeed, if feedback doesn’t affect—and thereby improve—the worker’s output, how useful was it?
Seeing the Matrix
When performing a pre-training analysis to determine what a client truly needs, we must cultivate this habit of pulling back and asking broader questions. We can’t just see the learner as they relate to the training we’ve been hired to provide. We have to see the entire performance system in which that learner exists at work.
I think of the movie, The Matrix. Our hero, Neo, gains his true power when he sees the world around him for what it truly is: a system. The illusion that everyone else accepts as reality is only an interconnection of competing instructions, or as Rummler and Brache might say: inputs and outputs. When Neo realizes the world—the world that everyone else complains about but ultimately resolves themselves to—is merely systems within systems, only then can he create significant and lasting change. (Well, we’ll see about lasting; a sequel is coming.)
That sense of perspective has benefits. It can make you a better instructional designer, because it will help you think laterally about how elements like inputs, consequences, and feedback affect both the performer and their outputs. Hopefully, it will help you identify more with your learners, but it doesn’t always.
Lost in the Machine
The benefit of that broader view comes at the expense of a more intimate one. That is the incumbent risk when you start thinking of a human as an element within a system; it dehumanizes them. We start saying things like “how does the high-performing customer service rep conduct these calls, as opposed to the average rep?”
It’s our job to ask those questions, but I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that it’s also our calling as improvisers to remember that these people aren’t just high-performing reps and average ones. They are Hiromi and Jorge and Shanice and Roy. Every learner is our scene partner. We should have their backs, too.
We can do this with our questions. We don’t just need to ask questions about workers, we need to ask questions of them, and engage them throughout our talent development work. They should be participants and co-creators, not just passive “performers” who receive the training “input.” Definitely take a systems view of training; see the Matrix. Just don’t lose focus on the actual people inside it.
References:
Covey, S.R. (1989). The seven habits of highly effective people: Restoring the character ethic. New York, NY: Fireside
Rummler, G.A. & Brache, A.P. (2013). Improving performance: How to manage the white space on the organization chart. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.