Page 23 - Making Instruction Work

chap 2 3/11/97 4:44 PM Page 11

the performance world 11

Any corporation, for example, has a variety of resources
available with which to accomplish its goals: machinery,
money, production procedures, research information, market-
ing, advertising, law, accounting, and so on.
One of the key resources is people. It takes people to do
many of the things that need doing. To get things done in a
way that helps rather than hinders the accomplishment of the
goals, however, people have to do things in a productive rather
than an unproductive way. The function of the performance
technology procedures is to make that happen. It reaches for
the tools of that technology when people already know how to
perform, and reaches for instruction when they don’t.

Figure 2.4

Management

Performance
Technology

Instructional
Technology

You can see by the model shown in Figure 2.4 that while
instruction is an important tool for improving human perfor-
mance, it is only one of the ways of doing so. For this reason
we say, “We’re no longer in the training business; we’re in the
performance business,” and why we say, “Instruction is a last
resort.”