Performance Consulting is not the Answer

As far as I can tell there are three approaches to designing learning; two of them you probably know about. I’d like to explain the third.

The first approach – the ‘traditional approach’ is content-centric. It starts with the question ‘what do we want these learners to know?’, and employs an ever increasing variety of mechanisms (classroom, online, etc.) to attempt to get stuff into people’s heads. It is, by its very nature, ‘top-down’. It’s also largely ineffective; whether at school or in the workplace the vast majority of content delivered in this way is lost shortly after it is delivered. It is often referred to as ‘push’-type learning.

The second approach – performance consulting is task-centric. It starts with the question ‘how do we improve performance?’ and employs an even wider set of approaches to attempt to improve task performance, which may or may not involve elements of traditional learning. Typically it does this by looking closely at the task to be done, and the things that are either standing in the way of optimal performance or the areas where additional performance support is needed.  This approach is much more effective, usually resulting in learning which happens at the point of need (pull) rather than push.

But performance consulting is only part of a more complete approach to learning. It is a little like Newtonian mechanics in relation to quantum mechanics – it works pretty well under normal conditions and is simple to understand, but it won’t give you the full picture.

To explain the third approach I would like to use an example: a student’s first day at school. I like this example because it mirror almost exactly the problem of staff induction. 

What do they need to know? The first (content-centric) approach might suggest they need to know the history of the school, the school’s rules, the names of teachers, the dress code, the school’s mission statement. They might receive these in joining instructions some time prior to starting.

The second (task-centric) approach looks at what a student might need to know in order to perform: they might need a map of the school, clear instructions regarding activities to be completed on their first day, during their first week, reference guides for key information and contacts. These would be available before and during performance. This would be a much better approach and welcomed by students.

The third approach begins by considering the affective context and mapping the patterns of concerns. It turns out that whilst students are concerned about how they will get to class, and what things they will need to do – their primary concern is actually just ‘fitting in’. They don’t want to make an idiot of themselves in the first week; they worry about what to wear on their first day. This was not a concern surfaced in the performance consulting approach, but it turns out that it lies beneath many of the performance issues: so this approach also generates performance support tools – such as maps and reference materials – but goes further in addressing the learning context, for example by providing access to a forum run by students themselves, different perspectives of the school shot by a variety of students, testimonials from students now moving into their second year regarding their experiences as a new starter. It turns out that these are the most popular learning resources – but neither the instructional designer nor the performance support consultant can quite explain why. They attribute it to the use of video as a format (somewhat sourly).

I’m really glad to see that the ‘resources not courses’ catchphrase is being used more widely; but I had never intended this to be merely a hat-tip to performance consulting (which is how I think it has been taken in some cases). If I look at our best projects, they have strong performance consulting elements – and performance consulting is a terrific starting point – but they go beyond merely performance consulting in addressing the broader affective context – the ‘care curve’ – that underpins behaviour more generally. The care curve will include those tasks that will be picked up by performance consulting (such as ‘finding your way around the place’) but will do two additional things: it will explain why these matter to the individual (and often it helps to know this), and it will reveal challenges not picked up by performance consulting (such as not wanting to make a fool of oneself).

Informal learning is – for the most part - associated with tasks. A task like starting school or joining a company. But how we learn and what we learn from these tasks varies according to the affective context not the tasks per se. We learn a lot when we start a job because we don’t want to make a fool of ourselves in front of a new group of people. If there weren’t this kind of impetus then we would make mistakes and we wouldn’t learn anything from them – because we don’t care what people think. But people do care. They care in complex ways, and these cares control their learning.