FarmVille for HPT

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it! Way better than "systems thinking serious game for instructional designers and performance support practitioners."

Too bad we don’t have a FarmVille for HPT. But I digress for a moment. Today I attended a webinar hosted by Boise State University for the IPT program, and Elliot Rosenberg was the speaker. He did a fantastic job and the main tenet he spoke about was understanding the business of your client. I could really appreciate that and know that it’s an area that I could use some work.

In my current course, Human Performance Technology, I’ve read several articles in the “Handbook of HPT” that discuss why it’s important to partner with the business, speak their language, and use their measurements. The entire time Elliot was speaking, I kept going back to one particular article by Silber & Kearny called “Business Perspectives.” They present the Business Logics Model, and have to admit that I’m dying to create one for myself for my own organization.

Basically, they hone in on how to identify key elements of the business model of your client or company. Just enough so that you are versed in what’s important to them, you can converse about their business practices and opportunities, and you are using their language. What I really loved was that it addressed a popular question in the ID world: do you need an MBA as well as an ID degree to truly connect with the business world you work in. The simple answer in this article is no, you don’t need an MBA, but you do need to take a little time to become acquainted with their business.

Are you feeling tricked, now? All this talk, but what about FarmVille? Well, this webinar got me thinking about training teams in general and getting a seat at the table, so to speak. How training departments can be organized in different ways, can be connected within an organization in different ways to other departments such as OD, IS, ID, Comm, Marketing, etc. Different connections and hierarchies would achieve different results. Different skillsets connected to each other, distributed or consolidated, would lead to different environments for performance support. Which made me think, what if we made a modeling game out of it? Would we, as HPT practitioners, learn something? What would be our crops? What would be our tools? How would we lay out the farms and create a trading system with other farms? What would we list as best practices?

I’m not sure, but I want to play to find out!

Photo credit:

The Pug Father http://www.flickr.com/photos/fleur-design/428341583/