Book Banter completed its discussion of Human Competence, Engineering Worthy Performance by Thomas F. Gilbert. Although Gilbert wrote this book over 20 years ago, his words continue to offer insights on improving competence in organizations. Gilbert emphasizes the need to communicate clearly the level, or vantage point, from which you, the performance-improvement engineer, are viewing the organization and suggesting a valuable contribution. For each level, there are stages to work through. The levels and stages make up Gilbert's Performance Matrix. The six levels are philisophical, cultural, policy, strategic, tactical, and logistic. The three stages are models of accomplishment, measures of deficiency, and methods of improvement.
In Part Three of the book the author addressed three of the levels in the Performance
Matrix: policies, strategies and tactics. Gilbert's main message in Chapter
4 addresses the issue of providing valuable information to the performer. This
chapter prompted a BookBanter discussion on the historical difficulties encountered
in attempting to persuade managers and
others to complete the difficult work of specifying desired work outputs and
standard measurements. Better guidance and feedback means less training is required
and the training that is required will provide better economic payback.
Additional discussion around Gilbert's Five Stages of Training Progression gave the Book Banter participants the opportunity to reflect deeply on their own practices in designing and delivering training. We saw many ways to improve our performance as instructional designers and performance-improvement specialists.