Why Gilbert Matters

Four decades after the original publication of Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance, let's consider the ongoing relevance of Thomas F. Gilbert’s most famous work. Certainly he remains the most revered and most important figure in the history of human performance improvement field. Does he still matter? 

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When I was in junior high school, I was a paperboy. I usually chose to walk rather than bike my route so that I could read The Boston Globe for an hour. Here are some of the big news stories that stick in my mind from 1978: A great blizzard dumps 21” of snow on an unprepared Boston; Bucky Dent’s dramatic home run propels the Yankees to a division title over the Red Sox; Pope John Paul I dies after only 33 days of papacy. Whether or not you were following news back then, you can see that 1978 was some time ago.

The 40^th anniversary of the publication of Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance is an invitation for reflection. ISPI folk celebrate Thomas F. Gilbert as the most revered figure in the history of our profession. After all he is ‘The Father of Human Performance Technology (HPT)’ and the namesake of ISPI’s highest honor. His Behavior Engineering Model (BEM) remains (possibly) the most cited model or concept in any gathering of human performance technologists.

Human Competence was first published before I entered the workforce, and Gilbert passed away before I had heard of him. After attending my first ISPI conference in 2008, I purchased a tattered copy of the Tribute Edition, which was published in 1996 shortly after Gilbert’s death. In this version, you get not only the book itself, but 17 pages of heartfelt messages that demonstrate what he meant to so many colleagues and friends. Gilbert’s unfinished posthumous autobiography, cleverly called Human Incompetence: Confessions of a Psychologist, adds 90 more pages of praise in its Addendum. The picture is clear: In addition to being a brilliant thinker, storyteller, and mentor, apparently, he was a great guy as well. I’m sorry to have missed him.

There is little question that Gilbert was great. Does he matter in 2018?

For answers, I returned to the text of Human Competence, with a reading that considers his relevance to the consultant or HPT practitioner of today. I conclude that yes, Gilbert still matters, and Human Competence is worth reading or re-reading today. Here’s why.

The Book Itself Is Great

“Length in perception has a certain independence of length as measured by a ruler. As we move away from a package of cigarettes, the length of its physical image on our retina grows smaller, nevertheless, the package seems 80 millimeters long at any distance.”

-Human Competence (Tribute Edition), page 339

Human Competence hits a rare sweet spot for a business book – somewhere between bathroom book and ponderous tome. It’s light (entertaining) enough so that it’s hard to put down, but heavy enough that you don’t want to read too much of it in any one sitting.

The quote above encompasses so much of what is distinctive, pragmatic, and charming about this book. Certainly, the reader will notice that Gilbert was a teacher at heart and professorial in tone. I find myself engrossed in his examples, immediately wanting to reread paragraphs or sections as soon as I finish them. This is the type of book that you might carry around in your bag for months, pulling it out during downtimes when you know it’s time for a break from your smartphone feeds. While there is a brilliant arc to the structure of the entire work, I find myself opening it up randomly rather than picking up where I left off. Sometimes it’s just enough to read some of Gilbert’s unique homespun verse that introduces most chapters.

The image of the cigarette package is a typical of the anachronistic turns you see from time to time. You’ll also see outdated business terminology. Hey, it was the 1970s. It’s 99% business in here, but Gilbert will take short asides on race relations, gender roles, or other contemporaneous issues. It gives the whole work a bit of a time capsule feel, which I find charming and amusing. Moreso than other books of its type and vintage, the author’s personality animates the work, and that is to the reader’s benefit.

As with this example, Gilbert’s lectures seem oblique when suddenly he makes a turn towards the subject matter at hand. Here Gilbert prefaces a discussion of the dimensions of human behavior with a discussion of the dimensions of the physical world. Side trips into scientific research methods and the relevance of animal behavior to the study of humans often underpin his messaging.

He Taught Us Timeless and Enduring HPT Lessons

“In the great cult of behavior, the appeal is to control or affect behavior in some way. There is little or no technology of ends and purposes. Indeed, behavior itself is view as an end rather than as a means to an end.”

-Human Competence (Tribute Edition), page 7

It's easy to say that Gilbert is outmoded because he's his best work is 40 years ago, and a lot has changed in the world. You will still find timeless nuggets of wisdom, some of which continue to be overlooked.


Lesson 1: Behavior ≠ Performance

Before we get through the first 10 pages of Human Competence, Gilbert introduces “the great cult of behavior,” and the image endures. He observes that managers equate performance with behavior at their own peril, and we all see the same today. This thinking leads to the still ubiquitous management anti-pattern: The assumption that performance is mostly a product of an individual’s knowledge, hard work, and intrinsic motivation. Who here hasn’t seen the manager who blames poor outcomes on incompetent or unmotivated employees instead of factors in the environment?

Lesson 2: It’s about the Environment

The most commonly cited lesson comes from the application of his Behavior Engineering Model (BEM): Factors in the environment have a greater impact on human performance than factors within the individual. Seldom does a week pass in my work where I do not need to correct a manager’s notion that remediating individual capabilities through training alone is going to have an impact on the problems their business face.

Lesson 3: Start by setting expectations

Gilbert sequences the six boxes of his BEM according to the likelihood of causing performance deficiencies. The failure to set proper expectations with employees is the number one contributing factor to poor performance. If people only knew what was expected of them and what outcome is expected of them, they would have a much better chance of doing a good job and helping to achievement of organizational goals.

He is Still Relevant for the 21^st Century

 “To love is to stand in the human vantage point, which requires us to stand with others for a common purpose.”

-Human Competence (Tribute Edition), page 348

The idea of starting with a common purpose is as old a humankind. Ancient hunter and gathering people would not cite their purpose as having sharp tools. Their purpose was to keep the family from starving to death. Now in recent years, we see many contemporary business books that espouse the same idea that Gilbert had. See the Purpose-Driven Economy by 2016 ISPI keynote speaker Allen Hurst. Look at Influencer, one of whose co-authors was 2014 ISPI keynote speaker David Maxwell.

As time passes, simplistic misinterpretation of Gilbert’s writing is common. Judging his masterpiece by its cover, the idea of “engineering human performance” conjures up the image of a pointy-headed solitary figure emerging from his cubicle with a finely-honed solution to underperformance. But for most savvy managers, the idea that you can engineer performance of humans through monolithic analysis is specious or misguided. It certainly flies in the face of how the world of work has evolved, where collaboration and adaptability rule the day. Such an approach puts too much weight on the process side of things and not enough on the human side of things.

This misinterpretation is not Gilbert’s fault. Empathy for the human condition is the subtext of all of Gilbert’s writing. We see poetry; we hear about love; we learn how people are different from animals. He is abundantly clear that the manager’s job is to address systemic conditions that impair the ability of individuals and teams to fulfill their stated purpose. Certainly analysis is necessary, but he doesn’t say that the supporting analysis needs to be onerous or without regard for the people in the system.

Any time you spend doing detailed performance analysis is time that problems continue to fester. What if you did a nominal amount of analysis, and then started with a plan to remediate the biggest obvious problem? Through an iterative cycle of retrospection and re-planning, you make early continuous progress toward your vision. Human Competence provides sufficient tools for doing this analysis in a lightweight way.

Conclusion

“Human competence is a function of worthy performance (W), which is a function of the ratio of valuable accomplishments (A) to costly behavior (B).”

-Human Competence (Tribute Edition) page 18

Being a devotee of Gilbert and an evangelist for his Behavior Engineering Model (BEM) can be exhausting. Outside of ISPI conferences or chapter meetings I never hear anyone but myself talk about, much less apply, what Gilbert taught us.

My book, Agile Performance Improvement, is the story of my learning to blend the mindset of HPT with the values and principles of Agile. HPT teaches us the value of front-end analysis, including root cause analysis, so that you can feel more certain that your efforts focus on the right things. Agile provides a set of methods to guide the actual doing of the work, the process of making performance improvement happen.

The way you did work in the 1978 will not really fly in 2018. The Agile Manifesto (and the methods inspired by it) are based on the idea that preplanning large (creative) projects introduces risk, because the moment you plan every task and dependency occurs at a point when you know less about the situation than you will know at any point thereafter. The iterative nature of Agile methods ensures that you regularly revisit and re-plan based on what you have learned (usually every two weeks). The notion that one person with a few spreadsheets can “engineer performance” undermines the idea that in a truly collaborative, empowered and nimble team environment, everyone can contribute to engineering worthy performance.

These are the reasons why Gilbert still matters. I have not read every book in our field, but among the ones I have, Human Competence remains the greatest, even 40 years after its initial publication.

Reference

Gilbert, T.F. (1996). Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance (Tribute Edition). New York: ISPI.

DON’Ts for Youth Hockey Parents and Coaches

Youth hockey tournaments are fun. You get to go to neat places; kids get to have lots of fun on and off the ice; parents get to hang out with other grown-ups; and everyone gets to eat a lot of junk food. This weekend at Jay Peak in Vermont, all of those good things happened.

Bless the coaches, who give their time and effort to their teams, and bless the parents, who pay for this whole thing. However, a small but noticeable portion of parents and coaches can and often do dish out an eyeful and an earful of bad hockey behavior. Here is a list of DON’Ts, based on actual conduct I witnessed this past weekend.

Parents

• If your kid scores a goal, DON’T act like you’re an 11-year-old who scored his first goal ever. It’s obnoxious.
• If you absolutely, positively must bring a cowbell to the rink, DON’T only ring the cowbell when your kid does something good. It’s annoying.
• If you spot your kid not back-checking, and the other team ends up scoring on that play, DON’T run down behind the bench and yell at your kid. It’s embarrassing for your kid.

Coaches

• If one of your players gets hit from behind, and lies motionless on the ice for 2 minutes before staggering back to the bench, DON’T put that child back into the game, even if you only have 4 defensemen. He has a concussion.
• If there is a bad call against you in the final minutes of a game that you are winning 4-1, DON’T say something to the referee that makes him have to toss you out of the game. You look like a jackass.
• If you’re disappointed with how your team performed, tell them in the locker room. DON’T bring the team outside the front door of the rink to yell at them in front of a bunch of strangers. It ruins the non-hockey part of the weekend.
• If you have to go out of doors to admonish your team over a poor performance, DON’T say, “you guys are a bunch of clowns,” before separating them into groups of players who did or did not play hard enough to please the coach. It’s humiliating for the kids.

No matter how many awareness campaigns, be it by USA Hockey or the Fox Valley Hockey Rink in Illinois (above), some small percentage of parents and coaches continue to misbehave. I’d love to confront/educate violators of these DON’Ts, but I’m not keen on getting into a parking lot brawl. 

I am going to just continue to do my best to remember why we have our kids participate in youth sports - to have fun, make friends, and develop a love for the game. 

DON'T forget it.

Airline Service Catastrophes

“You’re not authorized to do the right thing, are you?” I asked.

“That’s correct,” the JetBlue supervisor replied, meekly.

This was an escalation, and the supervisor literally was not allowed do what was necessary to assuage my inconvenience, no matter how small the cost. I learned at the airport that my family’s flight was cancelled. All she was empowered to do was cite rules and the various reasons that the situation was my fault. A simple solution would have been to put me on another Boston flight (one was boarding in a half hour), or provide a shuttle to the other airport for our new flight, departing at two in the morning.

In recent weeks, we see these obscene videos, with grounded passengers fielding startling abuse at the hands of policy-wielding airline employees. Just a few weeks ago, there was the doctor who was bloodied and dragged off the overbooked United plane. Then there was the guy who earned an extra day away from his family by peeing too close to takeoff. This week, we had the family that was booted off the Delta plane for violating baby seat protocol. In all of the videotaped situations, as with mine, the supervisor was unimpressed by any appeal to reason or decency.

Commenters on videos and articles about these incidents are correct to admonish the carriers with their “policies,” “rules,” and “protocols.” The airlines cite “rigorous training” in defense of their obviously beleaguered employees (sympathetic figures in these videos). However, the airlines expect the rigor of the training around policies to compensate for the utter lack of empowerment. In any of those situations, had employees been permitted to apply any modicum of common sense to do right by customers, without endangering the safety of others, I’m confident they would have done so, at little expense to their bottom line and quite to the benefit of their reputation. Instead you get a situation where a supervisor is not able to authorize a $90 shuttle ride from SJC to SFO, which would have pacified me, a loyal, points-collecting, tweeting customer who just spent $2,000 on tickets and writes a blog on human performance issues.

Time has passed since the days of Pan Am, when flying was an enjoyable and I daresay glamourous experience.  In the decades since then, the churn of the world, including oil embargoes, terrorist attacks, and task automation, has contributed to the increasingly dehumanizing experience that is air travel today. As much as airlines tout the customer experience, employees in these service catastrophes are put in a terrible position amid a system that doesn’t share their values. The cynical apologies, often blaming their own customers, portray a maddening tone-deafness. Hope for positive change driven by the industry is slim. Public activism via the cell phone video may help turn the tide.

Agile Can Be Discouraging. Don't Be Discouraged

I spend most of my time these days helping teams get started with agile. It usually begins with a straightforward request: “We are interested in agile, and we want to get some training so we can get started….”

These types of messages are most welcome. My role at CA Technologies is to help in whatever way I can to help teams get started and on their way to reaping the wonderful benefits of agile. After an initial discussion with the requester, usually we agree to establish a baseline of knowledge about agile and then pick a good place to start. And so it goes.

Too often I see teams, at least those who have a choice in the matter, give up on agile before or shortly after they get started. For me it’s a point of reflection on how I can do a better job of helping managers establish the conditions for success with agile. Nonetheless, I want to share a list of the common reasons I see for teams giving up, and a thought or two that may help these teams get back on track.

Why We Are Giving Up #1: “There are too many rules, too much process, too much change in the role definitions, and other stuff. It’s all just TOO MUCH!”

Why you shouldn’t give up: Yes, it’s overwhelming! That’s why I recommend that people start with a simple concept – how can your team improve how they work? Starting with the biggest problem or challenge facing your team, how can everyone mobilize around solving that biggest problem? And after you’ve started, when will you regroup to monitor progress? That’s about as simple as it gets, and it’s agile.

Why We Are Giving Up #2: “We’ve made an earnest effort to start practicing Scrum over the past few months, and yet, we haven’t seen things get better. If anything, our team performance has declined.”

Why you shouldn’t give up: Yes, your team performance likely will decline at first. It’s because you are, if you’re doing it right, fundamentally changing the way your team approaches work.

Why We Are Giving Up #3: “The Scrum events like daily stand-ups and retrospectives take up so much time. Like, we were all already overwhelmed before we started with this agile stuff, and now the addition of these different required activities is just piling on more work for all of us.”

Why you shouldn’t give up: If you go by the book, the Scrum events should take up about 10% of everyone’s time. Subtract from that the other meetings that those events displace, such as debriefing after something goes wrong or periodic planning, the total meeting time may not increase at all. The reality is that the Scrum events each have a specific purpose. The spirit of agile allows that the team could make a decision to NOT do some of the events. Our team for example, decided that it’s ok to have only three stand-ups per week instead of every day (and we haven’t been struck by lightning yet.) But, as you scale back these team activities, what are you giving up? If you scrap the Sprint Review, are you saying that you don’t want to get feedback from your customers on your finished work? If you don’t do a Retrospective, are you saying that your team is not committed to reflecting on how to get better? If you don’t do Sprint Planning, are you abandoning the idea that everyone needs transparency into what is important to work on and how each person will contribute?

Why We Are Giving Up #4: “Agile doesn’t work for how we work. We’ve always worked in a swim lane model, where everyone has their own assigned area of responsibility. We just don’t see why we need to communicate so much when most of what’s said is not relevant to most of us.”

Why you shouldn’t give up: This problem raises questions about the assumptions that go into a swim lane model. One assumption is that steady “coverage” ensures better service to the beneficiaries of each swim lane. Well, that seems to say that all areas of responsibility are of constant importance. To that I say: Ridiculous! People need to learn to work across swim lanes in response to what’s important at the time. During some periods, any given swim lane will demand urgency and a lot of capacity. At another times, it will be quiet. By being more flexible, you can move people to swarm around what’s most important. Over time, the team will develop improved adaptability as everyone learns about everyone else’s work.

Why We Are Giving Up #5: “We started with the 2-week iterations, and the people around us don’t work that way. They don’t understand when we respond to urgent requests by telling them to wait until the next sprint. They don’t understand why we want to deliver small bits of work biweekly when they would rather wait 6 months and see all of the work done.”

Why you shouldn’t give up: I get it. If everyone was working in 2-week sprints, things would be simpler. The fact of the matter is, the commitment you made to work in short iterations was made for good reasons. Now, you are in a position where you need to advise your customers why you do so, and how they too will benefit. Over time it can work, but it quickly shifts you from being in a position of adhering to rules of the method and actually being an evangelist for them.

Why We Are Giving Up #6: "The more I read up on agile and study the ruminations of the “experts,” the more I think these agile people are living in La-La Land. Collaboration and teamwork are cool, but business is not a place for rainbows and unicorns."

Why you shouldn’t give up: This reaction taps into one of the key reasons that people give up. Sure, many of the top agile “experts” spend a lot of time talking about the fluffy stuff, and some of them even sound like hippies. However, it’s a reminder of where agile came from. The principles and values of the Agile Manifesto mostly talk about how people work together. Generally speaking, people are very proficient at the technical skills of their job. After all, someone hired them on that basis. But teams and projects fail because of human factors and systemic issues in the environment. Agile asks you to examine those conditions and work together to fix the things that are holding the team back. Sure, that might involve talk of rainbows and unicorns, but you’ll see with experience that trust, collaboration, and humanity are the keys to the kingdom.

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Most of these dilemmas point to a very simple idea. Is your team willing to truly commit to getting better? If so, expect some bumpy roads, some exposure of feelings, and some upended assumptions. Nobody said it would be easy.

The idea that a thought or two from me could get teams back on track is interesting. I can’t give a thought or two if I’m not there. That’s why, as part of getting started, I recommend that teams establish and tap into a structured support system as they ramp up their agile practice. It could be a regular diet of discussion with an agile consultant such as myself, a close relationship with an agile coach who is helping to monitor progress, or even a mentor who has walked the path on which you now embark.

Are you struggling to maintain your momentum? Consider the ideas I’ve presented here, and let me know how you’ve overcome these challenges.