Get in the Game

By now you know I’ve spent a good part of my professional life guiding organizations through adopting, designing, implementing and measuring informal learning — better known to me as performance support (PS). The one thing that continues to amaze me is our limited view of this powerful discipline.

Our learners spend 80 percent of their time surviving and learning informally. Why don’t we have a more intentional and strategic way to approach that time? Our focus around formal learning is dangerous. I’m not sure many CFOs today are going to continue to invest in a resource that only impacts employees about 20 percent of the time. If we’re going to be viewed as strategic and have a measurable business impact, we need to get in the performance support game soon.

With that said, here are comments I often hear: “We’ve already invested in SharePoint, so we already have performance support,” or “We publish job aids, so we already have performance support,” or even worse, “We just launched our LMS last spring, so we already have performance support.”

My grandfather once said, “Just because you can swing a hammer, it doesn’t make you a carpenter.” The same holds true for PS.

I do think SharePoint and these other approaches can be a powerful part of an overall PS strategy. The problem is, using one or two tools, no matter how powerful, is not a strategy.

Many of you offer award-winning formal learning programs. Let’s focus on an old standard:

instructor-led training (ILT). Would you be offering an effective ILT program if you only had a classroom with desks and chairs — no instructor, no student manuals or instructor guides, no projection system to show slides or examples? Of course not. An effective ILT experience needs a number of key components to deliver the value and learning impact we have come to expect.

The same goes for performance support. Although the aforementioned tools can help add to an overall strategy, none of them alone fits the bill. Let’s discuss five principles that, when approached holistically, can help your organization provide a complete PS program.