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Does This Need To Be A Course?

Not every request deserves a course. Answer eight questions about the performance problem and find out whether training is the right instrument here, or whether a job aid, a process fix or a conversation would work better. It shows its reasoning, and gives you a summary you can send to whoever asked.

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Question 1If their job depended on doing this correctly today, could they?

The single most useful question in performance analysis. If they could, the gap is not knowledge.

Question 2What is actually getting in the way?
Question 3Do people find out whether they did it correctly?
Question 4What happens to someone who does it right, versus wrong?
Question 5How often does one person actually do this task?
Question 6At the moment they need it, could they look the answer up?
Question 7What happens when it goes wrong?
Question 8Why is this being asked for?

Answer all eight and the verdict appears here, with the reasoning and something you can paste into an email.

What this does

Eight questions about the performance problem, and a verdict on whether training is the right instrument. It can tell you to build the course. It can also tell you to fix the process, build the feedback loop, write a job aid, or have a conversation instead. It shows which of your answers produced the result, and gives you a summary you can paste into an email.

The question the whole thing turns on

If their job depended on doing this correctly today, could they? If the answer is yes, the gap is not knowledge, and no course will close it. People who already know how to do something and are not doing it are telling you about the environment, the feedback, or the incentives. Training them again produces a brief improvement and then a return to exactly where you started.

That distinction has been the foundation of performance analysis for fifty years, and it is still the step most training requests skip.

When you’d reach for it

A request lands and you suspect a course is the wrong answer, but you need something better than instinct to say so. A stakeholder wants an hour of e-learning for a task people do twice a year. Or you already know it should be a job aid and you need something to put in writing that does not read as an instructional designer avoiding work.

What it will not do

It does not know your organization. It works from eight answers you supplied, so an optimistic answer to the capability question will produce an optimistic verdict. It also has no view on whether the performance problem is worth solving at all, which is a different and often more useful conversation. Treat the output as a structured argument rather than a ruling.

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