My research into meaning of competence led me to a dusty bookshelf downstairs to take a fresh look at a b00k I first read thirty years ago.
In 1978, Tom Gilbert wrote Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. From the cover flap: “Not just another run-of-the-mill book on human performance, this provocative volume offers you a new system for getting the most out of people.” Ah, manipulation! When I first read Gilbert, I naively hoped he was going to show me how to make human things work.
“Behavior is a necessary and integral part of performance, but we must not confuse the two. To equate behavior and performance is like confusing a sale with the seller. The sale is a unitary transaction, with properties all of its own; and we can knw a great deal about it even though we know little–perhaps nothing at all–about the seller.”
“Roughly speaking, competent people are those who can create valuable results without using excessively costly behavior.”
“Human competence is a function of worthy performance (W), which is a function of the ratio of valuable accomplishments (A) to costly behavior (B).
W = B
“The sociologist wants to describe the world as it is; the performance engineer wants to turn it into something else.”
“All instrumental human behavior–all behavioral components of performance–have two aspects of equal importance: a person with a repertory of behavior (P) and a supporting environment (E). The saw and the hand, the light and the perceiving eye are merely two sides of the same coin. We can therefore define behavior (B) as the product of repertory and environment:
Gilbert studied under B.F. Skinner, so the terminology of rat psych sneaks into his narrative. He looks at behavior as stimulus-response-feedback. This overview creates a framework for analyzing behavior:
| Stimulus | Response | Feedback | |
| Repertoire | |||
| Environment |
Gilbert reformulates these as The Behavior Engineering Model:
| Information |
Instrumentation |
Motivation |
|
| Repertoire |
Knowledge | Capacity | Motives |
| Environment |
Data | Instruments | Incentives |
“I have found repeatedly that a culture that does not work well–in which people are unhappy, insecure, unproductive, and uncreative–was designed by a manager who did not begin with careful analysis of its goals and values.”
Reading Gilbert now, thirty years after my first reading, I’m re-discovering some thrilling viewpoints. “Scientists tell other scientists whether they are using a microscope, a telescope, a magnifying glass, or the naked eye. But when we talk to others about human performance, we usually leave it to them to discover which scope we use. And even when we make it understood which level of outlook we stand in, we are still likely to confuse our listeners unless we also communicate how we calibrate our scope.”
Gilbert proposes these levels of vantage point: philosophical, cultural, policy, strategic, tactical, and logistic, and suggests that you’ve got to start at the top. Put these levels against a model of analysis to yield a…
Performance Matrix
| Models of accomplishment |
Measures of deficiency |
Methods of improvement |
|
| Philosophical level |
Ideals | Integrity | Commitment |
| Cultural |
Goals | Conformity | Policy |
| Policy |
Missions | Worth | Programs |
| Strategic |
Responsibilities | Value | Strategies |
| Tactical |
Duties | Cost | Tools |
| Logistical |
Schedules | Material needs | Supplies. |
Drat. I was eating out of Gilbert’s hand when I came upon a page that reminded me why he turned me off thirty years ago:
But we aren’t rats, are we?
It hit me why Gilbert’s equations weren’t working for me in spite of my agreement with large portions of what he said: rats don’t talk with one another. Gilbert is leading us a path where individuals learn new ways or find new ways to carry on. On their own. Teamwork isn’t on the matrix. Human interaction, the greatest driver of innovation, is social, but it’s not there either, from my vantage point.
My search for the term for getting people doing stuff that makes a difference was hitting a wall because people are enmeshed in complex, adaptive networks. We’re all in this together. We are connected to others emotionally and informationally. Our very beliefs are inexorably drawn into a collective intelligence, shaped and shared by groups of us. It’s you and me, and we and he, and we are all together. If your network connections broke down, you would lose your identity at all levels. You are as others see you, and without them you are nothing.
Honor-roll grades or nearly flunking out of school makes no difference to your likely wealth, power, or happiness after school. How can this be? I think it’s because individuals are graded, not groups. Making money and attaining what you want rely on your success in relating to and interacting with others.
That old school paradigm lulled me into thinking that the best way to approach natural learning and encourage open conversation was one-by-one. Thinking about individuals seeking competence overlooks what for business is the Big Deal: organizational competence. What togetherLearn has been talking about is just this: Dump the top-down manipulation in favor of peers learning while working. Introduce more self-organization into the system. Provide “performance support” for sharing know-how, making conversation flow, encouraging experimentation… Forget about the rats.
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A very thorough and devastating critique. The engineering model is useful to build a construct for learning but falls short as the final solution. Jay Cross brings chilling insight to this discussion.
VJS