How People Learn by Shackleton-Jones Nick;

Author:Shackleton-Jones, Nick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page, Limited
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The dangers of focusing on tasks alone

Whilst performance consulting is a quick way to improve performance, the focus on performance and tasks means that it will always miss the complete set of things that affect how a person behaves, and so will always be limited in its potential for impact.

To see this, consider a small child on their first day of school. A performance consulting approach would identify one by one the tasks on the ‘critical path’ to achieving their goals, then analyse the changes that would make achieving these easier.

For example, new students might need to identify their teachers – a gallery of staff with pictures and names posted in communal areas might help. They need to get to classes on time, so a printed personalized timetable would be handy. They may be unfamiliar with the layout, so a school map – perhaps even lines painted on the floor – would help a new student get to classes on time.

All these things are good to do and will measurably improve performance against a number of key metrics.

But what performance consulting doesn’t do is analyse and address concerns – and these are what are ultimately driving learning. If you talk to new students, you will learn that what they are really worried about is fitting in, making friends, not embarrassing themselves, looking cool, dressing in a way that impresses people, saying the right things, not having their parents be mad at them and so on (interestingly these are almost identical to the concerns adults have when joining a new organization).

If you understand these concerns, there are a whole host of additional experiences and resources that you can design to address them. Performance consulting is not an approach designed to surface or address concerns, so it will always miss a big piece of the picture. Sure, kids want to get to class on time, but if you don’t understand why then you can easily design the wrong solution.

Conversely you might struggle to understand why kids with all the right performance support are nevertheless turning up late. It might be that this is deliberate – that they want to look cool, and being regularly late to class is part of their ‘rebel’ image.

Despite its shortcomings, performance consulting is a huge step forward from conventional education. So what stops learning professionals embracing this approach? It’s an approach that dramatically improves performance, time to competence, productivity and employee experience – all top concerns for business leaders. So why not?

In short, it’s tough for people with an emotional attachment to learning to switch to learning elimination. To let go of the (educational) idea that somehow our job is about getting knowledge into people’s heads. It’s tough for us to switch from building individual capability to building organizational capability.

But if we can let go, we can become the future architects that our organizations need, and for the first time have a genuinely positive effect on performance and employee experience. If we don’t, there is every likelihood

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