The Difference Between a Performance Gap and a Knowledge Gap

This post originally appeared on the Central Texas Instructional Design blog on this date.

This post derives from conversations I recently had with one of my clients. Everyone who has designed instruction for corporations has had some version of these conversations. You know: “We need them to do X, and they’re not doing it. Train them to do it.”

This training request always begs for further analysis. Why are they not doing X? Is it that they don’t know how (a knowledge gap)? Or is it that they know how but are simply choosing to do something else (a performance gap)?

As an instructional designer, you should always pray for a knowledge gap.

Why? Because a knowledge gap is much easier to address than a performance gap, and proving you have addressed it is much more straight-forward.

Still, addressing a performance gap is an opportunity to prove your metal. Just be aware that you must fill many roles to bridge a performance gap. You must also function as:

• A business analyst
• An industrial psychologist
• A salesperson

You become a business analyst because your first task is to determine the underlying cause of the behavior. Since you have already determined it does not result from a lack of knowledge, many training managers are quick to say that it is not a training issue, just as many performance managers are look to training as a quick fix to every problem. 

As industrial psychologists, we know that we can work in the affective domain. We can use training to change emotions and motivations. But here were are as likely to undercut our own credibility as to make a real difference. Why? Because the real world takes precedence over our ivory tower training. We must ensure that systems in the real world reinforce what we are trying to change with the training. 

I have seen companies whose new hire training programs would not take responsibility for performance more than a few weeks out because it didn’t take long for the business to “corrupt” the newly hired employees. You have seen it. How many times have you heard, “I don’t care what you learned in training. I’m gonna show you how it’s really done.”

So our psychologist persona has to talk with our analyst persona. If we change their behavior, is there something in the business environment that will change it back over time. For example, if we train them to take as much time as needed with every customer but we pay them for each customer they talk to, the system overrides the training by positively reinforcing quickness over customer service.

Now comes our roles as salespeople. When we identify the conflicts in the systems, we have to sell the idea of fixing the systems. We often have to train our customers so that we can train their employees. Otherwise, the beatings will never stop.