Human performance technology, white paper 02

A field that began by selling instruction spent sixty years discovering what instruction cannot reach.

01 · The historySixty years of one question

The discipline did not set out to be what it became. It was founded to promote a teaching method, and the whole of its history is the record of that method turning out to be the answer far less often than anybody expected.

In 1962 a group of military and civilian training people in Texas founded a society for programmed instruction and began publishing its journal the same year. Programmed instruction was then the most serious idea in training: sequence the content correctly, test at every step, and learning becomes engineering rather than art.

It worked, within its limits, and the limits arrived quickly. Practitioners kept meeting problems that better instruction did not touch: people who already knew what to do and did not do it, work that failed between two competent departments, incentives that quietly paid for the wrong behaviour. By 1973 the society was publishing under a different name, the National Society for Performance and Instruction, conceding, in one added word, that instruction was one intervention among several. In the mid-1990s “instruction” disappeared from the name entirely: the International Society for Performance Improvement.

When	What the society called itself	The unit
1962	National Society for Programmed Instruction	Instruction
1973	National Society for Performance and Instruction	Performance and instruction
Mid-1990s	International Society for Performance Improvement	Performance improvement

Two renamings, roughly two decades apart, each one an admission. The years are those under which the society’s own publications appear in library records.

Year	The work that moved it
1970	Harless, An Ounce of Analysis
1978	Gilbert, Human Competence
1986	Deming, Out of the Crisis
1990	Rummler & Brache, Improving Performance
1999	Stolovitch & Keeps, Handbook of HPT, 2nd ed.
2018	Kang & Molenda, the definitions reviewed

Four demolitions, one consolidation, one audit, and after 1999 the method itself stops moving. What accumulates after that is evidence.

01 · ContinuedA field that is honest about having been wrong

That sequence is worth dwelling on, because it is rare. A professional body founded to advance a technique publicly abandoned the technique as its organizing idea, twice, and kept the membership.

It is also the reason the discipline can be trusted on this particular question. A field that sells training and concludes that training is rarely the answer is not arguing in its own interest. It arrived there by watching what happened when it kept prescribing the same remedy, and it wrote the disappointment down.

Harless said it most bluntly in 1985, in an article whose whole subject is the myths the profession told itself: “Selling training, or its dumber brother, education, is hucksterism when there is no front-end present” (Harless, 1985, p. 4). He published it in the society’s own journal, about the society’s own practice.

What the renamings actually record

Not a change of technique but a change of unit. In 1962 the unit was the lesson. By the mid-1990s it was the performance, what somebody accomplishes at work, whatever it takes to get there. Everything else in this series follows from that move, including the awkward part: once the unit is the accomplishment, the department that owns the lessons is no longer the department that owns the problem.

The question the field has been asking for sixty years is therefore not “how do we teach this better?” It is: what is actually stopping the work from happening, and is it any of the things we know how to sell?

02 · The fourFour people and what each of them broke

The discipline was assembled by people working on different problems in different industries. What makes their agreement interesting is that none of them was trying to agree with the others, and each arrived by breaking something the others had left intact.

Who	What they broke	What was left standing
Joe Harless An Ounce of Analysis, 1970	The assumption that a stated objective is a starting point. He put analysis in front of design and called anything else guessing.	The front end: the idea that a diagnosis precedes a prescription, and that skipping it is the expensive move (Harless, 1970).
Thomas Gilbert Human Competence, 1978	The equation of behaviour with performance. What matters is not what people do but what they leave behind.	The accomplishment as the unit, the exemplary performer as the benchmark, and six conditions of which only one lives in the person (Gilbert, 1978).
W. Edwards Deming Out of the Crisis, 1986	The attribution of results to the worker. His own estimate settles the argument: “94% belongs to the system (responsibility of management), 6% special”.	Variation as a property of the system, and improvement as management’s work rather than the individual’s (Deming, 2000, p. 270).
Geary Rummler Improving Performance, 1990	The organization chart as a picture of how work happens. It shows the boxes; the work runs between them.	Three levels of performance and the white space between departments, where most results are actually lost (Rummler & Brache, 2013).

Four demolitions, one conclusion. The convergence is the reason to trust the order of the questions rather than any single author.

02 · ContinuedWhat none of them could see alone

Taken separately each of the four is incomplete, and the incompleteness is instructive because it is still visible in how organizations argue today.

Gilbert’s six conditions are a superb instrument for examining a job and a poor one for examining a handoff, because they take the performer as the unit and a handoff has no performer. Rummler’s levels find the handoff immediately and are less help once you are standing in front of a single person who is struggling. Deming establishes that the system dominates but does not tell you which part of it; his arithmetic is a prior, not a diagnosis. And Harless insists on analysis before design without specifying, in any detail, what the analysis should ask.

Put together, each covers the others’ blind spot. That is what the five questions are: Harless’s insistence on a front end, Gilbert’s conditions, Rummler’s levels and Deming’s prior, arranged in the only order in which they answer each other. Mager and Pipe turned the same logic into a decision sequence for practitioners, and their formulation, describe the discrepancy before accepting the remedy, is still the shortest statement of the method (Mager & Pipe, 1997).

Where the tradition stopped

The convergence was complete by the mid-1990s and has not fundamentally advanced since. What has accumulated in the thirty years after is evidence: transfer research, behavioural meta-analyses, the quality literature. Number 03 takes that evidence. The method itself was finished, and the reason it is not standard practice is not intellectual.

02 · ContinuedAnd two who settled what the four had left open

The four broke things. Two others closed a question none of the four had answered: what counts as a need in the first place, and whose job it is to ask.

Who	What they settled	Where this series uses it
Roger Kaufman Needs assessment, from the 1970s on	A need is a gap in results and never a gap in means. “We need training” is therefore not a need at all; it is a proposed method with the word need in front of it, which settles nothing. He also separated the levels a result can be stated at: what a person or team produces, what the organization delivers, and what it adds outside its own walls (Kaufman & Guerra-López, 2013).	Number 05 divides business need from performance need on exactly that line. Number 06 states the gap in results because of it, and number 12 refuses the request for the same reason.
Dana and James Robinson Performance Consulting, 1995	They named the role and the two conversations it lives in: the request that arrives with the solution already in it, and the business result that is moving in the wrong direction. They also mapped what stands between the two: a business result, and the performance that produces it (Robinson & Robinson, 1995).	The two doors, which order the whole series and appear on the cover of every number as the entry label. Number 12 is the first conversation and number 05 the second.

The one Kaufman lost

His third level is the one the field admired and did not adopt. Kaufman held that the ultimate client is not the organization but the society it operates in, and that an organizational result which adds nothing outside the firm is not finished being examined. The profession took his definition of a need and left the level where it stood.

This series works at the first two and says so. Where a client does ask what its performance is worth beyond its own accounts, a health system, a public body, anything with a social return to account for, that is the level it belongs at, and it has a literature of its own.

Nobody else has been added, and that is a decision. The discipline has a long roll of translators and packagers beyond these six, and a page of names is what a field writes when it wants to look established rather than useful.

What separates performance technology from other fields is that it begins, or should begin, with a diagnostic process. A technology without a diagnostic front-end is not very much separated from the world’s oldest business venture.

Joe Harless, Performance + Instruction, 1985, p. 4

03 · The claimWhy it is called a technology

The word is not decoration and it is not borrowed from computing. It is a claim about what the method produces, and it is a demanding one.

A technology, in the sense the founders meant, is a body of practice in which the same inputs produce the same output regardless of who applies it. Not a craft, where the result depends on the practitioner’s judgement, and not a school of thought, where it depends on the practitioner’s convictions. Two competent analysts, given the same organization and the same problem, should reach the same causes.

The unit of that technology is the accomplishment: not what people do, but what they leave behind, a distinction number 05 works operationally, because it is where most analyses go wrong in the first ten minutes.

That is the standard the field set itself, and it is the standard by which its own practice most often fails. Anyone who has watched two consultants examine the same situation knows that they frequently do not converge. The discipline’s answer is that convergence depends on following the order, and that most non-convergence is the result of somebody skipping a question.

The commitment	What it requires	What it rules out
A fixed order	The questions are asked in sequence, each narrowing the next, and none is skipped.	Starting from the intervention you know best and reasoning backwards to a justification.
Stated evidence	Every finding carries what it rests on and how far that evidence reaches.	Conclusions whose derivation is the practitioner’s experience.
Borrowed measures	The measure is one the organization already keeps, not one the analysis invents.	Instruments built for the study, which measure whatever the study wanted.
Falsifiable causes	A cause is a claim that could be shown to be wrong by evidence.	Culture, mindset and attitude, which survive any evidence at all.

Four commitments. Each of them is an argument you will have to have, and each is the reason the diagnosis holds up afterwards.

04 · The standardsTen standards, and the one that gets squeezed

The clearest statement of what this discipline requires is not a definition but a set of standards. The International Society for Performance Improvement certifies practitioners against ten of them and publishes them openly; they are reproduced below in the society’s own wording, with a line on each of what it asks for (ISPI, 2026).

Read as a flat list of ten they look like ten items of equal weight, which is misleading. They group into four obligations, and the order of those four is the method.

Be about the result, standards 1 to 4

Focus on results or outcomes. The result, not the activity that was supposed to produce it.
Take a systemic view. The work crosses departments; so must the examination of it.
Add value. Worth something to the organization, not only to the function doing it.
Work in partnership with clients and stakeholders. Including the people whose work is being examined.

Establish the need, standard 5

Determine need or opportunity. Evidence that the gap is real, separate from the fact that somebody complained.

Establish the cause, standard 6, the obligation a schedule squeezes

Determine cause. Why the gap exists. Not what would be nice to do about it.

Design, implement, evaluate, standards 7 to 10, and only now does a solution appear

Design solutions, including implementation and evaluation. Chosen because they reach the causes found.
Ensure the solutions’ conformity and feasibility. Legal, workable, affordable, and acceptable where it has to land.
Implement solutions. The part with its own failure rate, and its own literature.
Evaluate results and measure impact. A measurement that could have shown the solution failed.

Ten standards, four obligations. No solution type is named anywhere in the ten, not training, not coaching, not a system. The ten as the society publishes them today; the grouping into four obligations, and the marking of the sixth, are ours.

04 · ContinuedWhat each obligation actually asks you to produce

A standard is only useful if it names something you can be shown to have failed to do. Here is what each of the four requires somebody to be able to put on a table.

The obligation	What you must be able to put on a table
Be about the result standards 1 to 4	The measure, its owner, its current and its desired value, and a statement of who else is affected by moving it. Not an objective, a number somebody already publishes.
Establish the need standard 5	Evidence that the gap is real and worth closing, separate from the fact that somebody complained about it.
Establish the cause standard 6	Each cause placed at a level and attached to a condition, with the evidence for it and the limit of that evidence written next to it.
Design, implement, evaluate standards 7 to 10	Solutions chosen because they reach the causes found, a plan for putting them in place, and a measurement that could have shown they failed.

Four obligations, four deliverables. A practitioner who cannot produce the third has not done the work, whatever else is in the folder.

Notice what the ten do not contain. No solution type is named anywhere: not training, not coaching, not a system, not a reorganization. The standards describe an obligation to find out and an obligation to prove, and they are silent on what the answer will turn out to be, which is the only honest position for a discipline that claims not to know in advance.

Why the sixth is the one that is marked

Determining cause is the expensive obligation. It is the one that requires access to the work, contradicts somebody, and cannot be done from a meeting room. One to five can be satisfied by a well-run conversation; seven to ten by a competent supplier. Six is where the discipline actually lives, and it is the one a schedule reliably squeezes, which is the whole reason this series and the assistant behind it exist.

05 · The returnWhat an organization gets for working this way

The case for the discipline is usually made as savings, and savings are the least interesting part of it. Five things change, and four of them are structural.

What changes	How you notice
The same problem stops coming back	A symptom treated returns on a cycle, the second refresher, the third reorganization of the same team. A cause removed does not. The clearest evidence that an organization is treating symptoms is a calendar of repeats.
Arguments get shorter	When the causes are on a page with their evidence, the discussion is about the evidence. When they are not, it is about whose judgement to trust, and that discussion has no end condition.
The range of possible answers widens	An organization that asks about causes discovers solutions it does not sell: a form, a timestamp, an authorization, a rota. These are cheap, and they are invisible to anyone who began from a catalogue.
The problem finds its owner	Stated as a business result, a problem belongs to whoever reports that result. Stated as an adjective, it belongs to a staff function that cannot fix it and will be judged on not having fixed it.
And money is not spent on the wrong thing	The one everybody leads with, and the least durable of the five, because it is only visible in the year you avoid it.

Five returns. The fifth is the one that gets a business case approved; the first four are why the capability is worth having permanently.

What kind of claim that table is

These five are practitioner observation, not measured findings. No controlled comparison of organizations that diagnose against organizations that do not exists, as far as we can establish. The next two sections set out what evidence there is, on both sides.

What that is worth in money is a separate question, and number 13 does it. The point here is that the arithmetic is not the argument.

05 · ContinuedWhat the evidence actually supports

The discipline as a whole has never been tested as a whole. Two of its components have been, and the gap between them is where an informed reader will push.

The claim	What supports it	How strong
Instruction is a weak lever when the obstacle is not ignorance	Behavioural synthesis across domains, and the transfer meta-analyses on the weight of the work environment.	Good, with a transfer caveat. Number 03 sets it out and states the caveat.
Design built on analysis outperforms design built on assumption	The meta-analytic work on cognitive task analysis, in general instruction (Tofel-Grehl & Feldon, 2013) and in surgery (Edwards et al., 2021).	Good, and it is the closest thing to a direct test of the front end.
Causes sit in the environment more often than in the person	Deming, Rummler and Gilbert, convergent practitioner theory rather than measurement.	Convergent, not measured. Three traditions agreeing is evidence of something; it is not a trial.
Running this method makes an organization perform better	Nothing directly. No controlled study exists.	Unevidenced. This is the claim the discipline most wants to make and least can.

Four claims of descending strength. Quoting the fourth as though it were the second does the discipline harm, and there has been a good deal of that.

One line of evidence deserves care rather than a footnote, because it is the one most often quoted at this discipline. At the organizational level the association between training and performance is real and small. Kim, Chang and Bell synthesised 159 studies covering just over 75,000 organizations and found a positive but modest relationship, ρ = .13, varying substantially with what was trained, who was trained, how and when the outcome was measured, and the industry it happened in (Kim et al., 2025).

05 · ContinuedWhy this series argues from effect sizes in neither direction

The more important finding is methodological, and it has a consequence for how this series is allowed to argue, one that cuts against us as much as for us.

Reviewing 207 quantitative studies across forty years, Garavan and colleagues conclude that the field’s central difficulty is that training cannot be separated from the system it sits in: the effects are interconnected, time-dependent and bidirectional, and a design that treats training as an isolated cause of firm performance is measuring something the world does not contain (Garavan et al., 2021). Their proposal is to put the system back into the research, which is the same move this discipline makes in the analysis.

The rule it produces

It would be convenient to quote a small effect size as proof that training rarely works. That would be the same error in the opposite direction, and Garavan’s point forbids it: if training cannot be isolated from its context, then neither a large effect nor a small one settles anything about a particular problem in a particular organization.

So the argument here is not statistical, it is diagnostic. Is the thing that is broken the thing training reaches? That question is answered by looking at the work, and the answer is different every time, which is why this series is about a method rather than about a finding.

05 · ContinuedWhy this field has few studies, and why that is not a defect

A reader who checks the references will notice something. The evidence cited across these fifteen numbers is almost entirely meta-analytic, and almost none of it is about performance analysis itself. That is deliberate, and the explanation is part of the argument rather than an apology for it.

Medicine can run trials because it has standard diagnoses and standard interventions. A trial compares the same named treatment for the same named condition across many patients, and the whole apparatus of evidence-based practice rests on that being possible. Performance analysis has neither. Every case is one organization, with its own measure, its own process, its own history and its own binding condition, and the intervention that follows is designed for that case and for no other. There is no standard diagnosis to sample and no standard intervention to randomise.

That is not a weakness of the discipline. It is what the discipline is. A method whose entire purpose is to establish that this problem, in this organization, has this cause cannot also produce a population of identical cases for someone to compare.

Which produces the evidence rule for the whole series

Where these papers make an empirical claim, it rests on a meta-analysis or a systematic review. Where no such synthesis exists, they say so rather than reaching for a single study to fill the gap, because a white paper that cites one paper per assertion looks rigorous and is not. Single studies are the easiest evidence to find and the least likely to survive.

Everything else in these pages is one of three things, and each is labelled: the discipline’s own canon, our own practice over twenty years, or the strongest published objection to what we do. None of the three is dressed as research.

05 · ContinuedThe strongest published case against doing this at all

Cause analysis has a serious critic and it should be read rather than avoided. In BMJ Quality & Safety, Peerally, Carr, Waring and Dixon-Woods set out why root cause analysis in healthcare has so often failed to produce improvement (Peerally et al., 2017). Several of their objections apply to what this series proposes. Four of the five below are answerable. The fifth is not: every analysis here produces a finding for one organization and one decision, and nothing accumulates across them. Anybody adopting this method is buying a local instrument rather than a contribution to a body of knowledge, and that is a real limitation of the discipline as practised.

Their objection	Whether it applies here	What we do about it
“Root cause” is reductionist, it implies one linear cause	Yes. Any method returning “the cause” invites the same error.	The output is a set of causes, each at a level, each with its confidence stated. Never one cause.
It is done by local teams without the expertise it requires	Yes, and sharply. This series argues for running the analysis in-house on every request, which is exactly that.	It is the strongest argument for a method with a fixed order of questions and for an assistant that carries the questions rather than the conclusions. It is not a complete answer.
Time pressure and hindsight produce “causes of mutual convenience”	Yes. A four-week analysis under a deadline is exposed to this.	Every cause carries its evidence and what would raise confidence, so a convenient one is visible as such.
Organizations settle for weak controls, reminders, retraining	Yes, and it is the failure this series exists to prevent.	The order of the six conditions, with knowledge last. The one objection the method is built against.
Findings stay inside one organization, so nothing accumulates	Yes. A diagnosis is written for one decision and then filed.	Unresolved. See above.

After Peerally et al. (2017); the third column is ours.

06 · The nameThe Performance Consultant

The name is not new and it is not a job title. It comes from our own earlier work, where the detective is one of the roles the learning function has to be able to play if it is going to be of use to a business (Arets et al., 2016).

It is a useful name because it describes a posture rather than a competence, and the posture is the hard part. A detective does not begin from a suspect. They begin from a thing that happened, they establish what is actually known, and they treat the most obvious explanation as the one most in need of checking, precisely because it is the one everybody has already accepted.

The posture	What it looks like in a working week
Start from the evidence, not the account	Read the number before the meeting about the number. The account is what somebody concluded; the evidence is what happened.
Treat the obvious explanation as a hypothesis	It may well be right. It is also the one nobody has tested, because it did not seem to need testing.
Go where the work is	The white space between two departments is not visible from either of them, and never from a meeting room.
Say what you do not know	A diagnosis that states its own confidence and what would raise it is worth more than a confident one, and survives contact with a sceptical director.

Four habits, none of which requires a title, a budget or anyone’s permission.

The awkward implication is that the posture is often unwelcome. Establishing a cause means telling somebody that the thing they asked for will not reach it, and doing that on every request rather than on the two a year where there is time. That is a standing capability, not an occasional project, and it is the reason the last paper in this series exists.

07 · The limitsWhat this is not

A discipline that claims sixty years and a certifying body should be plain about its boundaries. Four of them.

It is not a change methodology. It establishes what is wrong and what would reach it. Getting two departments to alter a handoff is political work with its own literature and its own failure rate, and nothing in the standards makes it easier.
It does not guarantee convergence. The claim in section 03 is a standard, not a finding. Two competent analysts following the order will agree far more often than two consultants following their instincts, but “far more often” is not “always”, and anybody who promises otherwise is selling.
It is not a substitute for management. Deming’s point cuts both ways: if most of what goes wrong belongs to the system, then most of what fixes it is a management decision. An analysis can make that decision informed. It cannot make it.
The history here is compressed. Four people stand in for several dozen. The chronology is deliberately coarse: we give only what independent library records carry, the founding year, the journal, and the names the society published under, and leave out the founding-meeting detail that circulates in secondary accounts. The standards are quoted from the society’s current wording (ISPI, 2026).

Summary

A field founded in 1962 to promote a teaching method spent sixty years establishing what teaching cannot reach, and dropped the word from its own name to say so. What it left behind is an order of questions, a set of obligations and one uncomfortable habit: check the obvious explanation first, because it is the one nobody has checked.

Run it yourselfCauses, or what you can see?

Ten minutes, on your own organization rather than on a problem. Six questions, and the pattern of the answers tells you more than any of them separately.

The repeats. Which problem has been addressed more than once in the last three years? List the interventions. That is a symptom being treated.
The last three requests. Did each name a solution or a result? Count them. The ratio is your starting position.
The last analysis. When did somebody last establish a cause before money moved, and could you find the document?
The range of answers. In the last year, how many interventions were something other than training, communication or a reorganization?
The owner. Take your largest current performance problem. Whose report does its measure appear on? If nobody’s, that is finding number one.
The sixth standard. Who in your organization is expected to determine cause, has the access to do it, and the standing to contradict a manager?

Where this paper sitsTwo problems, one method, fifteen papers

	Business problem	Training request
Owned by	The manager or director who owns the result.	L&D and the HR business partner.
What it prevents	Spending on the wrong intervention, a system, a reorganization, a hire.	Spending on a programme that cannot reach the cause.
What it returns	The fix that moves the number, chosen on evidence.	The budget and the working hours that were not spent.
Method used	The same three analyses and five questions, which is why one capability serves both, and why the diagnosis no longer has to be bought in case by case.

One method, two returns, and a standing capability instead of a standing consultancy line.