Whether your need is large or small, we will always start by exploring what you want to accomplish through your people and how their performance needs to change in order for that to happen. We’ll focus not just on your people, but on other factors that can affect performance such as incentives, tools, or policies.

I am doing pre-work for a workshop about understanding and improving the way we do business. As part of that pre-work, I have been viewing a number of presentations on YouTube dealing with various aspects of business: Operations, Supply Chain, Quality Assurance, etc. Many of these presentations are a far cry from the home grown production quality one often sees. Want to watch Michael E. Porter discuss the five competitive forces that shape strategy? Need a quick refresher on SWOT Analysis? These and other gems are there on YouTube, waiting to be mined. The only thing missing is a structured approach to accessing them. That is where we come in.

Freestyle Dispenser

An interesting example is Coke’s new Freestyle drink dispenser. Capable of dispensing over 100 varieties of drinks, the new dispersers are rolling out this summer in select states. Aside from the sheer amount of choice to consumer has, the interesting element for me is the tremendous amount of data that Coke gets in the bargain. Using RFID technology, information on volume and type of purchases is sent to Coke for analysis.

An InformationWeek article provides more detail on Coke’s strategy:

Test marketing via Freestyle will be a lot cheaper than the model Coke’s been using: bottling and bringing to market new products that sometimes don’t gain traction and get canceled after a year or two. “This is a huge jump from our current fountain dispensers,” says Christopher Dennis, Coke’s IT director of e-business transformation. “It’s like going from the dial phone to the BlackBerry.”

And this summary of hoped-for benefits of Freestyle:

• RFID-tagged flavor cartridges let Coke track inventory and distribute beverage formulas over a wireless network
• Data on drinks served is uploaded daily to Coke’s headquarters
• Consumption data helps Coke and fast-food outlets decide what to serve and promote, and when and where to launch new products

• Operational data identifies dispensers with problems

Clearly the potential payoff for Coke and its vendors and customers is great. This leap forward in business intelligence could have great implications for performance technology. Stay tuned.

No matter where you intersect the field of human performance, there are certain books that you ought to seriously consider having in your professional library. I’m sure many of you have your own favorites and I’d be interested in hearing about them. Meanwhile here are seven that I personally wouldn’t be without. You’ll notice that in some cases these are not the hottest new books on the shelf, in fact, some are approaching 20 years old. To me, that’s part of what makes them good. They have stood the test of time.

1. The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman. This book has been around a long time, but its value is timeless. The book is a basic primer for anyone who seeking to understand how people interact with things and how intentional design can improve usability and reduce frustration.
2. Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance, by Thomas F. Gilbert. I have written about this book more extensively here. Suffice it to say this I believe this book is the jewel in the crown of the performance engineering field.
3. Performance Engineering at Work, edited by Peter J. Dean. Once you have become acquainted with Gilbert’s work, this book takes that work to the next level by building on Gilbert’s performance engineering model, describing applications of the PE model, exploring the      differences between PE and training, and suggesting themes for the future development and use of PE.
4. First Things Fast: A Handbook for Performance Analysis, by Allison Rossett. If you’re in the trenches and looking for great information on how to get your arms around real-world problems, this is the book for you. You’ll want to have this book right at hand for at least a few projects, and on your shelf for reference thereafter.
5. Building Expertise, by Ruth Clark. This book does a wonderful job of applying the principles of cognitive psychology to the domain of human performance improvement. One of my favorite things abut Clark is that she offers lots of examples. Practical application is a dominant theme in her writing.
6. Job Aids and Performance Support, by Allison Rossett and Lisa Schafer. This book is a great tool for understanding and implementing tools for performance support. Along with the conceptual view of performance support, Rossett and Schafer provide a wealth of examples to illustrate performance support at work.
7. The Nurnberg Funnel, by John M. Carroll. For those of us who focus on training people to use software applications, this book is an excellent treatise on the challenges associated with that      particular domain. Carroll proposes a minimalist approach to training that is task based and quickly immerses the user in completing meaningful tasks.

Having an impact on performance can take many forms, from a simple job aid, to eLearning, to an integrated performance support system and we can help you with any of these solutions and more. But one thing we won’t do is offer you someone else’s solution, because we know that every situation is different.

What we will do is help you identify the best solution to improve the performance of your people, then develop and implement it. We’ll also help you evaluate your return on investment to gauge the impact on your business.

I’m not interested in throwing yet another term on the pile unless there is some added value to it. All of the terms I’ve listed above however fail to fully articulate our purpose in two word limit I’m arbitrarily imposing. Of course I have no problem with the word Performance, which is our raison d’etre, it’s that second word that is so pesky.

Improvement? Duh. But how? It seems to state the obvious without being very helpful.

Technology? Sure, but that’s only part of the picture, we can improve performance in many ways without it.

Engineering describes a discipline and has the added baggage of being rather geeky. If you introduce yourself as a Performance Engineer, you are likely to be directed to the computer room.

Support is of course, a good thing and something we should strive for, but like Improvement, it is rather general. Plus it has the liability of being confused with Performance Support systems.

So, as Rod Serling might say: Submitted for your approval–Performance Catalyst. Merriam-Webster defines a catalyst as “an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action.” Yeah, I know, it sounds kind of like a chemical reaction, but if you think about it for a moment, catalysis of performance is what we ought to be striving for whether the catalyst is training, job aids, incentives, environmental change, or some other intervention in the status quo.

The thing I like most about the term its agnosticism about the action we take. In a nutshell, a catalyst is anything we do to make desired performance happen better, faster, or more efficiently. How we do it? Now that’s another question entirely.

The point I’d like to make is that for adult learners, the people I’m primarily concerned with in this blog, performance support is much more important than training.

Let me illustrate from my own recent experience. In the process of learning how to use WordPress’ blogging tools, I needed a bit of HTML syntax to include in a post. Now, I am not an HTML guru, nor do I particularly want to be, but not so long ago, I would have had to at least consult a book on the subject and spend time learning how to create what I needed.

Now, it’s simply a matter of typing the name of the particular HTML tag I needed into Google. Within the first five links was exactly what I needed; all I had to do was copy and paste. I can tell you that even now I don’t remember what I did. If I need to do it again, it’s back to Google.

As we consider the need to train adult learners, I suggest we focus more on training them to use the tools for supporting their own performance and less on the specific tasks they need to perform. In the Web 2.0 world and beyond, this will be increasingly important.

I recently invested an hour and a half of my time watching a video of the announcement of Google Wave to developers at the Google IO Conference, and I have to say it was one of the best uses of my time in recent memory. When it debuts later this year, Google Wave will truly be an integrated solution, offering a well-developed collaboration product, a platform for developers to enhance and extend Wave functionality, and a protocol to allow independent Wave systems to communicate seamlessly with one another.

From the standpoint of collaboration, a primary interest of mine, Wave has obliterated the old models for collaborative software. Within the Wave platform, workgroups will be able to share and edit messages, documents, pictures, video, and any other file within a single user interface. A particular collaborative stream is saved as a wave (you can have as many waves as you want) and can be thought of as a workflow. Users can appear at various points in the wave timeline as appropriate and come up to speed on work to date by using a playback features to view the history of the workflow.

From a performance support standpoint, I was especially intrigued the example shown of a Wave applet that allows users to play chess. In the demo a well-known chess game was played. The instructive point here is that the replay function would allow other users to review the game and contemplate the strategy involved in each move. Imagine the possibility that screencasts and other types of user knowledge could offer as a performance support tool when embedded in a system like Wave.

As with any breakthrough invention, new ways of thinking and working will evolve, that have not yet even been thought of. When Wave becomes available later this year, I look forward to seeing how the collaborative possibilities play out.

As group collaboration evolves, Yammer and similar applications offer one more interesting piece of the puzzle that is effective collaboration and knowledge sharing.