by Carl Binder
For several years we've been talking a lot about "performance thinking" and the Six Boxes Approach. One could even say that we're building a whole company and community of practice based on this key concept. I'd like to say a little about what I think this phrase means, its implications for our business and your practice, and how it distinguishes the work that we are doing from that of some of our esteemed colleagues in the human performance improvement field. This is, in some respects, an update on what I wrote last December about the same topic.
Some of the thought leaders in the field of human performance technology (HPT), represented perhaps most clearly by pioneering members of the ISPI community, have developed enormously detailed algorithmic approaches to analyzing and improving performance in the workplace, producing important and significant results in many organizations. These pioneering thought leaders have then applied their own methodologies to help others produce similar results. For example, one of those pioneers, Joe Harless, recently told me in an email exchange that the more detail he developed in his job aids and procedures, the more effectively his proteges were able to apply them with consistent results.
On the other hand, with greater and greater detail, fewer people were willing to use his tools and he was not able to have the "market penetration" for which he had hoped. He was not able to produce the revolution of widespread science-based performance improvement that he and his own mentors had envisioned. This is the testimony from one of the most successful and important leaders in the field of human performance improvement.
With The Six Boxes Approach, we are trying to go in a different direction. First, we are interested in a much broader audience beyond human performance improvement experts. We have seen over the years that when executive leaders, managers, supervisors, trainers, HR generalists and individual contributors learn about the Performance Chain and The Six Boxes Model, they become more able to understand and improve performance in all kinds of ways. Some applications are large, technical and detailed. Others are small, informal and ad hoc. But in virtually every case where the essentials communicated in these models and concepts have been applied, we've seen improvements in individual and group performance, employee engagement, and results.
So our approach, instead of providing extremely detailed job aids and algorithms, is to teach people how to understand, deconstruct, and then improve performance using these concepts and models. We also teach people how to communicate with one another about performance using the plain English of these models. Beyond the "big" successful projects we can claim over the years of applying what has become The Six Boxes Approach, perhaps our most important successes have been that people tell us with great enthusiasm how trainers and managers, leaders and HR professionals, team members and their supervisors, and people across all levels and all functions in organizations are communicating and collaborating with this "simple but powerful" set of models and language.
That is not to say we are ignoring the importance of tools and documentation. While we boast of using only a small handful of flexible work sheets and simple job aids, we are in the process of building what will eventually be a wiki for collecting and organizing what we and others in our community of practice have learned. We will document best practices, guidelines, hints, and other aspects of what w are learning about how to apply Six Boxes "performance thinking" to problems and opportunities ranging from corporate leadership to program implementation, from individual career development to process improvement, from departmental efficiency to onboarding, and from skip level meetings to raising our children.
The downside of not having finely detailed algorithms is that there is greater variation in how people apply elements of The Six Boxes Approach, and people sometimes struggle a little in the beginning. But this variation is also an upside because our fellow practitioners come back to us with applications and ways of using this approach that we would never have imagined. This, we believe, will be an important strength of the Six Boxes Community of Practice – innovation and continuous evolution. It's also why we see the core of this community as a growing number of Six Boxes Coaches who help others through initial applications to avoid beginners' mistakes. We are in the process of building a Six Boxes Certified Coach Program, now in its initial stages, but soon to be much more broadly available. As part of the Six Boxes Application Program, participants receive coaching in their initial applications.
So this is a way of thinking, not a specific procedure. It's an approach, not a strict "methodology." In the end, fluent Six Boxes performance thinkers are able to look at performance, link it to results, understand what drives it, and re-arrange behavior influences to move things in the desired direction. We hope through this work to enable many, many people around the world to benefit from the science-based principles embedded in our visual models and plain English concepts by better managing their own and others' behavior to produce the results that they and their organizations seek.
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