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Cause Analysis and Systems Thinking

It’s been traditional within performance consulting to talk about cause analysis or even root cause analysis.  This implies a mentality that we can get to the cause or primary factor responsible for the performance gap.  This also seems to imply a linear “start-stop” relationship of sorts.

Klaus Wittkuhn has written about this issue.   His point is that a systems approach (and a good performance analysis requires a systems approach) would reject the idea of a linear scheme with a clean start and end. كيف تربح في مراهنات كرة القدم  If we’re truly taking a systems perspective to performance, than we have to honestly admit that issues are circular.  That means that the concept of “a cause” is probably flawed. كيف تربح المال من النت Continue reading “Cause Analysis and Systems Thinking”

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Performance Consulting in Government

At the recent (2009) ASTD International Conference, I had some great conversations with a performance consultant in South Africa–Bill Sewell.  Bill was busy trying to tap into US Government contacts to find out our experience with performance consulting.  With South Africa’s transition to a new President (Jacob Zuma) and an effort to be more results-focused, he was looking at what lessons we may have learned in that arena.  Bill wanted to know what US Govt. organizations were doing with performance consulting.

And that question made me stop and think.  The track record of performance improvement within government, at least on a broad-based level, isn’t that impressive within the US.  Of course, the US Coast Guard, due to their initial involvement with Joe Harless and then Paul Elliott, has probably been doing performance across the entire organization longer than any other governmental entity in the US.  But the Navy dismantled their Human Performance Center (that was starting to do some great work by the way). Continue reading “Performance Consulting in Government”

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ASTD 2009 Conference

Magazine Cover

It’s always fun to attend conferences.  At the 2009 ASTD International Conference, one of the things the staff did was allow attendees to pose on their own T+D cover.  Okay, it may be a conference promotional tool but it’s nice to see a performance consultant on the cover of a trade magazine!

Joe Willmore, President

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Learning from Geary Rummler

Those of you who have talked with me a lot or have read some of my work (especially No Magic Bullet) know how highly I think of Geary Rummler.  The performance world lost a true friend and original pathfinder when he passed away in 2008.

I was fortunate to get a number of unique opportunities to collaborate with Geary.  He and I both served on ASTD’s Board of Directors at the same time—we had some great discussions.  He took all of the kidding from some of us about his last book (Really Serious Guide to Performance Consulting) in good spirit. Continue reading “Learning from Geary Rummler”