A recent blog post that was highlighted in the monthly digest from the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) caught my attention, not so much because of what it said, but because of the question it asked.

In the several decades that I've been involved with building sales training and performance interventions for business-to-business sales, I've learned about the important advantages of defining sales performance by identifying the milestones and progress indicators or accomplishments that exemplary sales people work day-to-day to achieve in their territories and accounts.

Another great Harvard Business Review article, The Agile C-Suite, got my attention this month.  It talks about the balance that leaders need to find between efficiency and innovation, particularly in uncertain times. 

When we think of change management, we generally envision implementing a new system, process, strategy, or policy. Or perhaps we need to plan for a corporate reorganization, and all the changes that will be produced and needed for success. Change management methodologies, such as ADKAR from Prosci, offer processes for systematically preparing for and then executing big change – when timing is under our control.

This article is an "oldie but goodie" from the March-April 2018 of Harvard Business Review . But it is as relevant as ever, and timelessly so in relation to our Coach-Manage-Lead programs . 

The authors talk about how Human Resources functions in companies need to keep up with the pace of business change, and that "agile" talent development is going to be the way it happens. In 2018 they were talking about this as a new trend, with great examples. But two years later, it's more relevant than ever.

A recent article  in Harvard Business Review called The Feedback Fallacy debunks a number of widely accepted ideas about the effective use of feedback on human performance.  In particular, it addresses “the overriding belief that the way to increase performance in companies is through rigorous, frequent, candid, pervasive, and often critical feedback.”

Iconic.     Well, maybe some day...   It's not iconic (yet), in the sense of being widely recognized as fundamental and authentic. But I've been thinking lately how truly 21st Century our Six Boxes Performance Thinking® approach is. And how it IS based on the classical work of great 20th century thought leaders, starting with B.F. Skinner, whose natural science of behavior continues to change the world in ways that we don't even recognize because it's so embedded in our daily lives. And on the work of Dr. Tom Gilbert, author of that remarkable book, Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance, who taught us to anchor the analysis and improvement of performance in accomplishments or work outputs, the valuable products of behavior, not in behavior for its own sake.  Then came Dr. Joe Harless, who took Gilbert's Performance Engineering and turned it into a repeatable performance improvement technology for performance analysis, effective job aids, and accomplishment based instructional design. Those giants in the field were iconic.  And they laid the foundation for accomplishment based performance improvement as it has evolved into this century.

In the latest issue of HBR there's an article called Managers Can't Be Great Coaches All By Themselves.  I can't help but think of our Six Boxes® Performance Coaching as big solution for the issues they raise.

Years ago, a colleague and I published an article that did not get much attention, devoted to the contrast between competency modeling and an accomplishment-based approach, based on the work of Thomas F. Gilbert, pioneer in the field of human performance improvement.  At that time, competency modeling was relatively new, shiny, and heavily promoted by training companies and consulting firms. On the surface of it, competency modeling seemed to offer a way to define capability in a way that was convenient and could form the basis of discussion about performance. Countless organizations devoted many millions of dollars and person years to developing competency models, building performance management systems in which people received “ratings” on those competencies, developing learning management systems and curriculum architectures built on competencies, and so forth.  In my view, it was a scam. 

Robert Horn is one of those creative geniuses whose contributions have come in waves. He has been acknowledged on our web site as one of the key sources of inspiration and technical influence underlying the work of The Performance Thinking Network, particularly our efforts to communicate widely about performance improvement.