Performance Enablement: Support Performing in an Unlearnable World

Accelerating innovation and change will soon outpace learnability. This is made evident by the number of patents granted by the USPTO, which will increase from 7 million over the past 40 years to 40 million in the coming 40 years. Each granted patent represents a potential product, service, or process which your workers may need to perform. Accelerating automation will require more manual workers in pre-automation/product development phases between invention and automation and fewer in the production phase. The nature of that work entails frequent changes; a lack of stable workflows impedes learning/memorization. Learning leaders need to develop solutions for enabling, assuring, and continuously improving performance in a world changing faster than workflows can be memorized.

In this session you’ll discover why training and learning are ineffective in rapidly changing environments and how to enable, assure, and continuously improve performance when training and learning are impossible. You’ll participate in a “systems thinking” session to develop a high-level solution that will address how to: 1) Enable manual workers to perform assigned workflows without prior training; 2) Assure quality performance including how to assure every step of every process will be performed every time, how workers can get help when something goes wrong, and how to detect underperformed steps; 3) Effectively and efficiently deploy new and changing global workflows; 4) Capture the valid, unbiased, reliable, high-integrity data needed to reveal continuous improvement opportunities and proving a return on your investment; and 5) Continuously improve performance across all worker and non-worker performance factors.

In this session, you will learn:

• To identify when workflows are unlearnable
• Why training and learning will give way to performance enablement and performance assurance
• What technologies will be needed to support performance enablement, assurance, and continuous improvement
• How accelerating innovation and automation will impact learning organizations and what to do about it