Dave's Whiteboard

In an online conversation, I found myself again quoting Joe Harless. In this case, the quote was from a March 1975 interview with Training magazine.  I haven’t found this online anywhere, so thought I’d summarize a bit here.

A little background: Harless coined the term front-end analysis.  As he wrote in a workshop guide, to help our client achieve its business or organizational goals:

We begin at the end and work backwards in the basic progression:

1. We first find out what goals are not being achieved satisfactorily, or what the new goals are when they are set by the client.
2. We then find out what accomplishment is not being produced satisfactorily that is causing the goal not to be met.
3. We then find out what behaviors are not being obtained that cause the deficient accomplishment.
4. Then, and only then, can we determine which of the influences need to be manipulated.

The process just described is called Front-End Analysis.

The Training interview asked if FEA were “just the Joe Harless shtick.”  Harless replied that it was real “if you define real as having a definite set of procedures…and data and case histories” along with people who are applying these things.

Front-end analysis began with the realization that we could produce excellent training packages, ones that pleased not only the developer but the client.  And yet follow-up evaluation ( “which…we jokingly called rear-end analysis” ) revealed that, as often as not, skills didn’t transfer to the job.

So Harless wondered why.  “Being devotees of the scientific method, we advanced certain hypotheses… [And] we began testing these hypotheses.”

To Harless and his collaborators, rear-end analysis asks, “Why didn’t the training produce the intended result?”  Front-end analysis asks three other questions:

• What are the symptoms that a problem exists?
• What is the performance problem producing those symptoms?
• What is the value of solving that problem?

And that’s where the quote comes from:

Training: Value in terms of what?

Harless: In terms of money. Front-end analysis is about money first and foremost.  So is training.  If not, you’re baby-sitting or doing psychotherapy.

Harless said this as an aside to the main theme of his interview.  Even so, this is a lodestone for anyone working in organizational learning.  I agree that the individual needs to have some personal investment in order to learn effectively on the job.  She wants to raise her skills, or master a new task, or prepare for a new position, or gain satisfaction from resolving new challenges.

Those are her variables.  The organization has variables as well; the relationship between the two sets is an effort to balance the work-equation.  How can those skills, those tasks, those challenges make sense for her in the organization’s context?  “Is it worth  spending X to achieve Y?” Solve for the organization.  Solve for your personal goals.

I’m not trying to reduce this purely to dollars, and I don’t think Harless was, either.  (The same people who get nit-picky about “ROI for training” are strangely silent when a merger like Daimler-Chrysler–financially analyzed, you’d think, to a fare-thee-well–ends up vaporizing billions of dollars.)

When Harless says, “Value in terms of money,” I see it as shorthand.  Money is the most common and most convertible indicator of value in group activity.  You can choose other indicators; you just have to work harder.

1975 was fairly early in the history of performance improvement, though I don’t think we’ve yet reached the Golden Age.  Here’s the Reverend Harless preaching on a related theme:

You know, trainers are forever going around looking for respectability.  They’re always asking, “How can we sell management on the idea of training?”

Well, the answer is, you don’t.  You sell management on the benefits of solving human performance problems. You make it clear to management that you are there to avoid training when it’s not cost-effective.

That’s how you get to be a hero.  That’s how you get to be respectable…That’s how you avoid being stuck off in some personnel department somewhere.

By the way, Guy Wallace’s Pursuing Performance blog has a 2008 video interview with Joe Harless:

“Almost always, the client came to us requesting the development of some kind of training intervention… [in a typical situation, the workers] already knew how to detect and correct…defects….They were not doing so because…they were being paid for the quantity of production rather than the quality of the production.”

I was surprised to learn–from my wife, no less–that I unconsciously assess things (especially edible things) on a personal scale with almost as many degrees as a thermometer.

It’s an understatement scale, I guess, because even as my approval increases, the terminology is…less than exuberant, as in these examples:

• That’s okay.  (Barely acceptable.)
• That’s not bad.
• Not half bad.  (Well above average.)
• Not bad at all.
• That’s all right. (At least one Michelin star.)
• Pretty good.  (At least two.)

There’s a theoretical maximum, “really good.”  It’s like absolute zero, only warmer; you don’t find it much in nature.

I asked my children whether they’d ever heard me apply these terms.  They couldn’t say, because it’s hard to talk when you’re convulsed in laughter.

The purpose of a scale is twofold: measuring and evaluating.  Measuring is a comparison with some standard: you’re this tall (in inches, in cubits, in stacked-up poker chips).  You typed 268 characters in 3 minutes and made 4 errors.

Evaluating is forming a judgment, usually by means of a further comparison.  You’re tall for a 14-year-old boy.  You meet the minimum speed required for this job.

Thanks to Stephen Downes’s OLDaily, I came across Clarence Fisher’s connecting assessment.  It’s a rubric he created for middle schoolers “to help students think about the connections and global understandings they are establishing.”

He doesn’t plan to assign grades based on where students are–this is a conversation starter, he says.  To me, it’s a way to say to the student, “This is how it might look if you’re at a beginner level of skill.  This is more-than-beginner.  This is how it looks if you’re accomplished.”

Fisher offered another rubric in an earlier post–one to help grade student blog posts.

What I like about these is that Fisher shares what he’s come up with for a particular situation.  He even provides Google doc versions (blogging rubric, connecting rubric) in case someone wants to use them as starting points.

Pretty good, I’d say.

“Approval scale” image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by mag3737 / Tom Magliery
(images are his; cartoon balloons are mine).

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, and the first thing to come to mind was this song from Peggy Seeger.

When I was a little girl I wished I was a boy.
I tagged along behind the gang and wore my corduroys
Everybody said I only did it to annoy,
But I was gonna be an engineer.

A recent interview with Dr. Peter J. Pronovost dealt with safer ways to care for patients in hospitals.  Pronovost is the medical director for the Quality and Safety Research Group at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

The interview’s worth reading on its own merits.  I saw in it good examples of performance analysis and efforts to improve performance–with relative few attempts to train people out of non-training problems.

For example, for cardiac catheterization, Hopkins had an infection rate of 11 per 1,000 procedures.  According to Pronovost, at the time that “put us in the worst 10% of the country.”

Here’s a diagram I created to illustrate some influences on performance:

And here are points that Pronovost makes:

• Hopkins developed a checklist to standardize what to do before catheterization (wash hands, clean skin with chlorhexidine, drape the patient, etc.).  To me, this is support for item 3 above.
• Supplies, which had been stored in as many as eight places, were prepped in a cath cart–with someone assigned to make sure it was stocked and handy.  Item 2, equipment and materials.
• The hospital asked nurses to remind doctors to wash their hands–and empowered nurses to stop procedures if this didn’t happen.  Item 8 (standards) and item 9 (feedback) — and, you could argue, item 7 (consequences).

Note also that the Hopkins project defined a specific problem (a high rate of infection), analyzed likely causes, chose action based on those causes, and measured the results.

Pronovost forcefully describes another barrier to performance: workplace culture:

As at many hospitals, we had dysfunctional teamwork because of an exceedingly hierarchal culture…

…in every hospital in America, patients die because of hierarchy. The way doctors are trained, the experiential domain is seen as threatening and unimportant. Yet, a nurse or a family member may be with a patient for 12 hours in a day, while a doctor might only pop in for five minutes.

I mention this not to single out doctors but to emphasize that performance problems usually have multiple causes.  Some you can address in a straightforward fashion (rethinking where to keep the supplies).  Others, you have to keep working at.  In commercial aviation, use of preflight checklists is maintained not only by regulations but by the active support of those who use them: it’s not smarter or more efficient to try memorizing the checklist.  In fact, it’s seen as counterproductive.

(Note what the Skout Group says about workplace culture–and checklists–in terms of USAir 1549, the plane that Sullenberger and Skiles managed to set down in the Hudson River last year, with no loss of life.)

Back to the hospital: isn’t there some need for training?

I couldn’t say; Pronovost’s interview doesn’t have enough detail.  It could be that some hospital staff need training in preparing for catheterization.  If that’s the case, I suspect that inside the generalization of “preparing for catheterization,” there are distinct subtasks: identify and obtain the supplies, prep yourself, prep the patient, assist (or be assisted by) a specialist, and so on.

And perhaps there’s a meta-skill: make sure the individual assigned to this task can first demonstrate an acceptable level of skill.  In other words, something like “we expect you learned this in nursing school (or wherever); here are our standards; we’ll observe you and tell you how you did.”

I don’t know that I’d put the necessary culture change under “training.” I’m pretty sure the label is less important than the goal: having doctors (most not hospital employees) and hospital staff work together to reduce the rate of preventable infection.

Word of the day: nosocomial, meaning “occurring in a hospital.” I came across it in this 2001 CDC report, The Impact of Hospital-Acquired Bloodstream Infections.  Its low estimate for life-threatening bloodstream infections acquired in the hospital is 87,500 per year.  The low estimate of deaths from these bloodstream infections: 8,750.

(And bloodstream infections are estimated at 10% of all nosocomial infection.)

This morning’s Washington Post has an article about college professors banning laptops from their classrooms.  (The first example is from a Georgetown Law lecture on “democracy and coercion.”)

Similar bans, the article claims, exist at William and Mary, the University of Virginia, and other big-name schools.

It’s been years for me since college, so my own notions are just notions.  That rarely stops me from musing.

• That law lecture occurred in a room with a hundred students.  Ipso facto, it seems to me, the average student didn’t get to say ten words.  Not that you have to say something to rework, reconsider, connect what’s new to what’s known–but talking about new material is at least as helpful as writing notes on paper.
• It’s not as if a room without laptops is a room without distractions (or a room that suddenly has interesting lecture).  As a U-Va professor says, “If students don’t want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems.”
• One comment added to the Post story reminds us of all the people who doodled, crossword-puzzled, or just read the sports pages while safely and quietly lodged toward the back of the lecture hall.

I don’t mean to seem one-sided.  No matter how cool your keyboard, even ten people in a room going clickety clickety clickety can be distracting–just as Worlds of Warcraft can be when it’s on the screen of the person in front of you during Conflict in Nineteenth-Century East Asia.

Stepping completely outside things I know about: maybe the tried-and-true formal education approach isn’t always ideal.  A law professor in a lecture hall might not be so impartial about his methods as to concede their shortcomings.  Is a lecture to 100 people an optimal way to achieve whatever the goal is for “democracy and coercion?”

Maybe not–because formal systems like law school have a built-in time and exposure constraint, culminating in not just the law degree but the bar exam.

Mostly I think the question hinges on specifics: what’s the purpose of this (presumably in-person) class?  Why is it in-person?  Am I as the professor dispensing knowledge (the Font of Wisdom approach)?  Am I encouraging people to explore issues, grapple with implications, bring in things from the outside?

Consider the approach of another Georgetown law professor (who does allow laptops).  He told his class that Chief Justice John Roberts was stepping down from the Supreme Court.

That was untrue, as the professor knew–but the news flew out.  It seems the real point of the lesson was: credibility. (Much more on this story at Above the Law, including a follow-up.)

CC-licensed image of lecture notes by Kevin Lawver.