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to the next problem. He hasn't thetime for popularizing or the tempera-ment to stay with a single idea longenough to become widely identifiedwith it-to become well-known. Con-sequently, a lot of people, especiallythe short-term people in the field, arenever exposed to his work in its origi-nal form."

The most cursory review of Gil-bert's career makes it clear that Hol-den's assessment of his friend as aman driven more by the challenge ofdifficult problems than the quest forfame and fortune is an accurate one.An undergraduate degree in philoso-phy from Harvard came close to lead-ing him into academia. "But one of myprofessors pointed out that the onlything you can do with a Ph.D. in phi-losophy is teach philosophy," Gilbertrecalls. "I couldn't see that at all."

Instead, he enrolled at the Univer-sity of Tennessee, where he qualifiedfor doctoral degrees in both clinicalpsychology and psychometrics. Hepromptly eschewed the practice ofboth disciplines. "I guess I'm a profes-

TRAINING's continuing series of profiles of trciners and managers

Tom Gilbert: The WorldIs His Laboratory

Thomas F. Gilbert is a seminalthinker, one of those people who, bythe power of their logic and clarity oftheir insight, make the rest of us feelmentally ham-handed. And he is atrainer-never mind the fact thatwhat he frequently thinks about long-est and hardest are ways to avoidtraining. If you're in the training busi-ness, even if you've never heard ofTom Gilbert, his ideas affect the wayyou work.

Friend and occasional co-workerStanley Holden, president of Perfor-mance Services, Inc. of Humble, TX,understands both the impact and therelative obscurity of Gilbert's work."Tom has been working on the criticalissues of performance technologylonger than most people have been inthe field."

Gilbert's work and the principles hehas extracted from it have had a pro-found impact on the human resourcesdevelopment (HRD) field in threeareas, Holden says. "There is the areaof training itself, where he has beenvery innovative. And he is one of themost significant thinkers in the areaof job design and performance aids aswell."

But Gilbert's most significant work,Holden feels, "has been in developingthe whole idea of performance analy-sis and performance engineering. liewas thinking in performance-engi-neering terms long before anyone else.It's fair, I think, to say that he person-ally specified most of the key conceptsof performance analysis. Others havecome along, simplified them and pop-ularized them, but Gilbert invariablywas there first."

Gilbert is, indeed, much more a sci-entist, an engineer, a theoretician,than he is a promoter and marketer."Tom has all the respect in the worldamong senior people in the field," saysHolden. "He spends most of his timethinking, finding clients who will lethim experiment with new ideas, writ-ing the whole thing up and moving on

110 TRAINING DECEMBER J 984

sional Promethean. I like to take ontough tasks and try to have a big im-pact on things. Psychometrics, thetesting business, doesn't have that.[Even an excellent test] is, what, 3% or4% better than a coin toss at predict-ing success? And clinical psychologyis an even worse crapshoot; there is noaccountable bottom line."

Gilbert ended up at the Universityof Georgia, "trying to figure out whatto do next." But a brief stop at EmoryUniversity during that period gavehim his first taste of the training anddevelopment world and foreshadowedone of the central themes of his laterwork. "It was during the Korean War.We had a project to teach soldiers toavoid frostbite and trench foot. Thetraining worked well; at the end of iteveryone knew how to avoid frostbiteand trench foot.

"But when we followed up," he con-tinues, "we couldn't tell the people wetrained from the general population ofsoldiers. The incidence of frostbiteand trench foot was the same for boththe trained and untrained. It was myfirst taste of the hard reality that itoften takes more than training tochange behavior."

While "fumbling around" at Geor-gia, Gilbert encountered the writingsof B.F. Skinner. "Skinner's The Behan-ior of Organisms and some of his writ-ings on teaching machines had a pro-found impact on me," he recalls. Inresponse to the behaviorist move-ment, Gilbert wrote several papers ontheoretical application issues. One ofthose papers ("I believe it was the oneon fundamentals of the operant-quite heady stuff.") prompted an in-vitation to join Skinner at Harvard ashead of Skinner's learning lab. Duringthe same period, Gilbert accepted acommission to help Bell Laboratoriesin New Jersey start a teaching-ma-chine department.

The Bell Labs experience setanother pattern for Gilbert. Out of it,he penned a paper entitled, "The Prin-

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I TRAINING PEOPLE I

ciples of Programmed Instruction,"one of the first acknowledgments thatthe principles of learning used inteaching machines had more generalapplicability.

While at Harvard, Gilbert wasstruck by the need for a translation ofbehavioral-science research findingsinto useful procedures and processes.Though his work tended toward thetheoretical ("We were working on de-fining the dimensions of the oper-ant. "), he was privately hatching anidea. "I felt it was possible to designan organization where theoretical andpractical research could come to-gether and both would profit from theexperience. "

Gilbert found his first opportunityto build such an organization not atHarvard, but at the University of Ala-bama. And though his associationwith Alabama's Behavioral Researchand Development Laboratory lastedonly two years, two critical events oc-curred.

The first was the founding of theshort-lived but powerfully influentialJournal oj Mathetics, "mathetics"being a term Gilbert coined to describehis approach to instructional technol-ogy. Though only two issues wereever published, it marked the first op-portunity for Gilbert, colleagues anddisciples to put forward their viewson behavior management and instruc-tion, and to describe projects thatused the mathetics technology. Thejournal didn't last long, but the influ-ence of its articles has. The matheticsapproach to instructional design isstill widely cited, and many of Gil-bert's original teaching sequences arestill used to illustrate exemplary in-structional programming.

The second critical event was Gil-belt's decision to leave university life."I felt that industry was much moreopen to our ideas than was academia.For example, we had done some verygood demonstration work and went toNIMH (the National Institute for Men-tal Health) for implementation fund-ing. Everyone was excited by our re-sults and impressed by our proposal.But we were turned down because thefinal decision maker was a psychoan-alyst who didn't believe in a behav-ioral approach," Gilbert explains.

Several consulting adventures fol-lowed. In 1962, Gilbert establishedTOREducation with Karl Sondheimer,who later gained notoriety as the dis-coverer of the Cuisinart food proces-sor. In 1964, TORwent public and Gil-bert left to found Energy Conserv a-

tion Training with David Sage. "Wespent the next two years primarilyworking for the American Gas Associ-ation developing a model for cost-ef-fective co-generation." Gilbert de-scribes the period as "intellectuallystimulating, but a financial disaster."

Undaunted, he tried again, and thethird time proved to be the charm. In1966, he established the Praxis Corp.A year later, Geary RummIer, one ofthe founders of the University ofMichigan Center for Programmed In-struction, joined Gilbert in the Praxisventure. By 1979, when it was pur-chased by Kepner-Tregoe Corp., Prax-is had clearly become one of the majorinfluences on the practice of trainingand development in the United States.

Reflecting on that period, RummIercomments on what he believes to bethe two keys to Gilbert's impact on thetraining field: personal genius and adesire to share hard-won knowledgewith others. "His ability to take on adifficult problem and to have extraor-dinary insights about it is somethingto behold. But he has never been sel-fish about what he has learned andnever content just to go around com-mitting minor miracles. He is genu-inely eager to teach his technology toanyone who is willing to stop and lis-ten."

Trying to get Tom Gilbert to talkabout Tom Gilbert is quite a chore.What you end up with is a litany ofthe projects he has found most inter-esting and instructive. To every per-sonal question-"How do you likebeing called the guru's guru?" "Howdo you feel about t.he impact of yourbook Human Competence?" "How doyou react when you hear a speakerannounce that he is using 'The GilbertApproach' to such and such?" -theresponse is identical: "It's nice toknow your work has been useful tosomeone." Period. No elaboration. Nocommentary.

What does start him talking are theprojects-and the things he's learnedfrom 25 years of pushing the perfor-mance-engineering viewpoint intocommon consciousness. The mindflashes, and the conversation dancesalong an almost endless stream of as-sociations.

"Forty percent of the projects I'vebeen involved with have been fail-ures, at least in the long run. Somethings have been unsuccessful rightfrom the start; you just know theclient isn't going to listen to the solu-tion you know will work. I had a nu-clear power plant for a client for a

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brief period after the Three Mile Is-land incident. They wanted me to 'fix'their operator training. What wefound, though, was that while therewas an incredible human-factorsproblem, there really wasn't a trainingproblem at all. But since the NRC (Nu-clear Regulatory Commission) hadconcluded that more training wouldsolve Three Mile Island-type prob-lems, the client only wanted to hearwhat kind and how much training to'add, not that an actual solution mightbe possible.

"At least half of the successful proj-ects I've worked on-half of the solu-tions-have disappeared in fiveyears. Someone at AT&T recentlyasked me to do a talk on operator mor-ale. I did a little investigation prepar-ing for that talk and found that a feed-back system we had helped themdesign seven years ago was still inplace in 50% of their offices. In thisbusiness, that is a roaring success."

Gilbert on why most efforts tochange performance fail: "Measure-ment. I find that almost all measure-ment systems are bad. Most of thetime they are nonexistent. When thereis one, it is measuring things that mis-lead people. People most often mea-.sure activities instead of results. Buteven most results systems are mis-leading. For instance, we were work-ing with the Yellow Pages advertisingpeople. We noticed that their measure-ment system told them about sales butdidn't give a clue about who [the buy-ers were]. When they readjusted themeasurement and found out that 28%of their sales were to brand-new ac-counts every year, they didn't needany help figuring out why they werehaving trouble growing at the ratethey wanted to."

On management in general: "Wedon't believe in systematic manage-ment in this country. If we did, therewould be positive models to point to,but there aren't. Managers keep get-ting sidetracked by issues they haveno control over-world money prices,raw materials costs, and so on. As aresult, they don't control the fewthings they can influence.

"Managers have control over onlythree things that can affect productiv-ity: The systems that tell them howthey are doing economically, the de-scriptions of the jobs that need to bedone (good job models) and behavioralsupport systems. Instead of control-ling these, they worry about motivat-ing employees, and selecting employ-ees. They get caught up in the 'let's

look at the inside of the employee'nonsense.

"They could get a lot more mileage,for instance, by concentrating on in-centives, figuring out how actually topay for performance. But that's hard.So is standing back and looking forbarriers to performance-you have tocritique yourself when you do that.

"But let's not be too hard on man-agement. The American corporationhas only been around for about 80years. And it is a very, very complexform. We aren't going to learn how tocontrol it overnight. I get a little impa-tient with the quick-fix, 60-secondcure-ails. Nothing as complex as thecorporation is going to be understoodand controlled with simple ideas."

On the accusation that the Gilbertapproach to understanding and engi-neering worthy performance is anti-humanistic: "Quite the contrary. Ifyou provide people with better tools,better skills, a better environment inwhich to work, you are being very hu-mane. If, on the other hand, you startmessing about with their insides-trying to probe into what makes themtick-you are destroying their hu-manity. Leave my insides alone. Myleadership style, my IQ are none ofyour business. Measure my accom-plishments, assess my performance,but leave my insides alone."

Who is Tom Gilbert? The best an-swer is the one he himself gives. "Justsay I'm an engineer, trying to designsystematic ways to improve humanproductivity. That's all, really." Andthat's really quite enough.-R.Z. m

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