I’m not sure we all totally understand money. For some, I’m convinced, it’s an end in itself. For many, it’s a way of keeping score. How else to explain the household-name CEO with millions in salary, hundreds of millions of shares of his company’s stock, deferred compensation earning three times the rate of inflation, who nonetheless allowed his tame board of directors to pay for five golf-club memberships, a pied-a-terre, flowers (to ease the burden of being away from home, no doubt), and postage?

I’d like to have heard, “Hey, this is a great job, I love what I’m doing. I’d do it for less, so you don’t have to buy my gardenias.”

Your soccer analogy suggests that people have different values (I nearly said “goals”) for the organization. Even in a professional sports organization, “show me the goals” is a bit shortsighted to me. If a baseball team’s only validation is to win the World Series, then each year 29 teams fail.

I think you can define a number of other aims, not necessarily exclusive: winning the division, winning the league, retaining or increasing fan loyalty (in terms of attendance); also, maintaining or increasing profitability from broadcast income or licensing.

Much as I tire of sports analogies, I’d point out that the Boston Red Sox went 82 years without winning the World Series, yet retained legendarily loyal fans.

Yes, they were delighted when the team did win the Series again, but “show me the goal” doesn’t quite explain the previous fervor.

Anything other than money at work and you end up with all the confusion of a barter economy.

This is a particular problem with non-profits who, for some reason, resent any mention of the filthy lucre. This is odd when you consider the fact that the money they steward is not theirs.

It reminds me of soccer fans watching their team losing. We may have lost (ie scored fewer goals) but we play a more beautiful, open, flowing, passing game…

Show me the goals.

It’s always a pleasure to hear from you. My experience is similar to yours: most of my employers and my clients were less concerned with my process than with my product.

What I hear in Joe’s remark is that if your training (or your front-end analysis) is not aimed at increasing value for the client, then you’re baby-sitting or doing psychotherapy. He didn’t mean that in a positive way.

You’re right that front-end analysis, like performance improvement, is about people. So, yes, there’s a psychosocial direction. I joke that my religion is Reform Behaviorist, because I don’t know how to influence internal states directly even though I think they exist.

The questions that Kelly and Allison raise are important. As practitioners, it is abundantly clear to us why we need to do our work a particular way. It’s also abundantly clear to our clients that we know what we’re doing – that’s why they have sought the services of a professional to handle the job.

In 27 years of practice, the only clients I’ve met who were as interested as I was in the process my team was using to complete a project were from some part of the government or from a corporate education department. They suffered, in every case, from an overly enthusiastic view of the direct correlation between process oversight and positive results.

Most buyers care as much about what we have to do to deliver results as they do about what their accountants do to get their taxes prepared. Usually, they really only care about three things:

1) How long is it going to take (i.e., how much longer am I gonna have to put up with things as they are)?
2) How much is it going to cost me directly (i.e., what number am I gonna have to write a check for)?
3) How much is it going to cost me indirectly (i.e., how much of my staff’s time are you gonna eat up, how many favors am I gonna have to call to grease the skids for you, how much stuff am I gonna have to give away)?

I am a Harless fan, but I part ways with him at the psychotherapy remark. FEA isn’t psychotherapy, but it is about people. And the really good designer needs really good people skills, both for interacting with others and for observing the interactions between others. Consultants, too – the ability to understand and (dare I say it?) manipulate client psychology is critical to successful relationships and successful projects. It can’t be understated.

The client is, by definition, driven by the final result. If he knows what he wants, then let’s give it to him – they often have good instincts, those clients. When we point out that product design entails some “research” (First Things Fast gives us smart ways to do it), reasonable clients can appreciate how that’s true. It could happen that our research leads us to raise concerns and offer new approaches to meet his needs. He may be, as is his prerogative, unpersuaded by our alternatives and rationale. But we’ve all acted as responsible professionals.

I’m with you. Learning from Harless, Brethower, Rummler, Rossett and others altered my career. (It had the side effect of making me very unhappy with the sheep-dip approach to training.)

What’s behind the many models and approaches is a systematic, data-driven approach. You don’t necessarily need to use it in every circumstance, but the higher the stakes, the more it seems worthwhile to consider the risk/reward factors before plunging in.

Kelly:

Another version of being fixed on the solution is what someone called feeding the elephant. In her case, her employer had “invested” scandalous amounts of money in a couple of satellite-uplink locations for live videoconferencing.

As a result, all training activities not only had to consider whether live videoconference made sense–they had to help amortize the “investment” and use the uplink locations (feed the elephant). Whether that had any improvement on the training, let alone on performance, was a question for another day that may not yet have arrived.