The Learning Challenge by Nigel Paine

Author:Nigel Paine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page

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CASE STUDY Bob Mosher

To get an expert perspective on performance support, I talked to Bob Mosher. Bob Mosher is the former Senior Director and Learning Evangelist at Microsoft. He left that company in 2006 to join the performance support company Ontuitive. He subsequently left Ontuitive to set up his own company, Apply Synergies, with colleague Dr Conrad Gottfredson.

The summation of his and Gottfredson’s work during those first five years became their book, Innovative Performance Support (Mosher and Gottfredson, 2011). Mosher embraced the concept of performance support although he had worked for most of his career in a more conventional L&D role. His personal journey reflects a growing impatience with the inadequacies of current L&D practice. The essence of this impatience is in the single solution that L&D applies: a structured learning intervention, as opposed to the more complex analysis of need and the meeting of that need with an appropriate response. This is the model offered by performance support. It does not replace a development strategy: it adds more elements and more effective choices.

More and more large companies are adopting performance support as a core element of their development strategy. Three examples, Herman Miller, McDonald’s and Deloitte illustrate the diversity of organization. Each of these companies works in a very different sphere: Herman Miller builds office furniture, McDonald’s is probably the world’s most famous restaurant chain and Deloitte offers business consultancy and accountancy services. Each of their approaches is very different, but each is fit for purpose and built around the company’s needs.

What has allowed performance support to come of age has been the increasing availability of powerful technologies, specifically mobile technologies, that can better enable services that can orchestrate all of the areas that Gery (1991) describes in her definition of performance support given above. Until these technologies were available, performance support was often clunky and clumsy. It did not quite live up to the theoretical expectations that had been elaborated so many years ago. In some ways, the full implementation of performance support has taken over 20 years in gestation to become established and gain traction.

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