Speaker #1 - Chris Ross, HPT Consultant

   This past week, many from the LDT program had the luxury of listening to speaker Chris Ross. He is a Certified Safety Professional and Certified Performance Technologist who owns a consulting firm called The Engagement Effect. He has over 30 years of experience as a performance consultant, trainer, lector, and presenter.

 

   My biggest take away from him was surrounding the importance of the gap analysis and its effectiveness on outcomes and results. I learned that the gap analysis not only plays an important role for instructional designers but that of performance technologists. Whether an individual is being hired for HPT or ID, the analysis and events surrounding it carry more than 50% of the entire work. 

 

   I was very surprised when Chris said how often businesses cannot articulate or define their outcomes and in creating true return on ROI (return on investment) or ROE (return on expectation), identifying these outcomes is critical in nature. Outcomes falling within the following:

•      IR – Increased Revenues

•      AC – Avoid Cost

•      IS – Improve Service

•      RC – Regulatory Compliance

 

   I absolutely enjoyed his analogy when discussing Carl Binder’s redo of Gilbert’s Engineering Model. He mentioned the typical lack of performance in the workplace is more often caused by environmental/organizational factors rather than individual factors and that the cheaper and best action is to fix the environment as opposed to trying to fix the individual. In his analogy for confirming this fact, he compared it to a person trying to fix/change a spouse or partner in a relationship and how this rarely works. He reinforced this by saying the goal for HPT is to fix the system, not the individual. 

“If we put a good performer in a bad system, the system will win every time.” – Geary Rummier

   In reflecting on his speech, again my biggest take away was the importance of conducting an effective gap analysis. I find HPT to birth interest in me to interview successful HPTs and learn more about the governing principles and theories of the field and only then would I be able to make an informative decision to pursue a similar role. Chris was able to give his perspective and experience from working in the industry which helped to create an idea of what it might be like for someone in pursuit of a similar career. I was somewhat surprised by similarities of the importance of a gap analysis for both ID and HPT.