by Thiagi

Here’s an example of how a performance technologist can apply playful strategies to the performance-improvement process.

The president of a start-up corporation hires you to train her employees to provide skill-coaching to each other. She gives you a free hand in conducting your own analysis and coming up with an appropriate strategy.

Interactive Analysis

You decide to start with a performance analysis (or front-end analysis or needs analysis). This step involves identifying the gap between the desirable performance and actual performance. In other words, you want to find out what type of skill-coaching the employees need and what type of skill-coaching the employees provide to each other. If there is a gap between these two, you have a performance need.

Instead of designing a lengthy questionnaire and conducting boring surveys, you decide to play a game to collect the data. You assemble a group of employees and briefly talk to them about skill-coaching. You divide the participants into four teams and ask them to collect data from all employees (including themselves) about the desired and actual state of skill-coaching. You briefly describe different data collection strategies including interviews, observation, telephone polls, and e-mail surveys. You announce that the teams have two weeks to collect, analyze, and summarize useful data. At the end of this period, each team is to prepare a two-page summary and deliver its recommendations in a 3-minute presentation. After the presentations, each team will rate the performance of the other three teams and identify first, second, and third place holders. You combine different teams’ ratings and identify the winning team. The participants have a fun time—and you have useful data.

Interactive Design

The data collected by the employees confirm that there is a significant gap between their desired and actual coaching behaviors. Rather than taking the traditional route of developing a training package, you decide to provide skill-coaching to the employees on effective skill-coaching techniques. The reason for your decision is that the necessary competencies (such as giving demonstrations, asking questions, making suggestions, and giving feedback) are basic. What the participants need is repeated practice and feedback. To achieve this, you develop three videotape segments demonstrating effective skill-coaching techniques by some of the employees. You also prepare a one-page checklist of important principles of skill-coaching. You assemble participants into teams of five, walk them through the items in the checklist, and use the videotape segments to illustrate key points. Following this, one participant in each team coaches another on a job-related procedure. After this coaching session, other team members give feedback on the first player's coaching behavior. This procedure is repeated several times until all participants have practiced skill-coaching their peers and receiving feedback from them.

Interactive Evaluation

A critical element in the performance-technology process is to evaluate and improve the intervention. Here again, you decide to play a game. You gather several employees who have gone through the coaching-the-coach program and organize them into three teams. One team is asked to attack the intervention and identify everything that is wrong and undesirable about it. Another team is given the task of defending the intervention and elaborating on everything that is effective and positive about it. The third team is asked to prepare a balanced list of both positive and negative features of the intervention. After a suitable pause for the teams to prepare their case, you bring everyone to a mock courtroom. The two extreme teams take turns to present their case to the jury comprised of members the neutral team. At the end of the arguments, the jurors decide which team presented the more persuasive case. They also present items from their balanced list of positive and negative features of your coaching intervention. During these activities, you take copious notes. You congratulate the winning team and thank all participants for their valuable feedback. Then you return to your office to review the notes about the problem areas to be fixed and the positive features to be strengthened.

Interactive Implementation

After some appropriate changes to your coach-the-coaches package, you are ready to implement it on a large scale. Once again, you decide to play a game to kick off the new program. You recruit four employees and teach them a new procedure that none of the employees know. This is a job-relevant procedure for checking e-mail attachments for hidden viruses. After making sure that the four selected employees have mastered the procedure, you appoint two of them as the leaders of the “red” team and the other two as the leaders of the “blue” team. You tell these leaders that their job is to recruit and coach as many of the other employees as possible, using the skill-coaching procedure. The leaders should make sure that their coachees have mastered the procedure and encourage them to coach other employees. At the end of four weeks, you will find out which team has coached the most employees. This team will receive a special plaque.

You Are Ready

Performance consultants tend to be serious introverts. For several years, I have been trying to encourage them to take on a more playful approach to their practice. As the example above shows, you can apply playful techniques during each stage of HPT process. The advantages are obvious: We involve everyone in the process and get real-world feedback instead of limiting our interviews to a few top managers and experts. We make it easy to bring about the desired change because participants already own the change, having been involved in its development.

Improving human performance is a serious business. It deserves to be handled in a playful fashion.