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Individual performers, work teams, and organizations may be considered complex adaptive systems, while most current human performance technologies appear to assume simple determinism. This article explores the apparent mismatch and speculates on future efforts to enhance performance if complexity rather than simplicity is assumed. Included are implications for key concepts such as learning and performance, for theory, practice, competencies, and overall approach, and for the identity of the field.

Designers today face the daunting challenge of having to create more powerful, more innovative, and higher quality products through better, faster, and less costly processes. Can present approaches meet these challenges? Probably not. How might, we develop approaches that can? One path that seems reasonable is to try to gain a bettor understanding of the conditions and practices that lead to our best designs. If we can identify and describe these conditions in sufficient detail, then perhaps we can reproduce them and increase our chances of meeting today's challenges. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of a concept called the “liminal state” that we feel may represent a central element of designing and a condition that when embraced leads to the very best design products and processes. We will define the “liminal state,” describe a variety of contexts in which it may occur, and speculate on some particular areas where liminal states might improve performance.

The purpose of this research was to determine to what extent human performance technology (HPT) is being taught in academic programs that traditionally emphasized training—programs such as instructional systems, training and development, human resource development, and adult learning. A written survey was used to collect data from 82 academic programs. Results indicate that while training (and the related areas of needs assessment and evaluation) continues to dominate curricula at these institutions, non-training performance improvement strategies (and the broader performance analysis that leads to their selection) are frequently taught as well. No correlations were found between the extent of teaching HPT topics and the variables of program size, program type, location, degrees offered, or faculty membership in NSPI (now called the International Society for Performance Improvement). Future research could investigate the driving and restraining forces that determine HPT's impact on the curriculum and the effects that current curricula have on program graduates.

The Organizational Communication, Learning, and Design Department at Ithaca College is experimenting with educational methods that situate learning in authentic contexts, for example, in real cases with actual clients. We hope that these methods will better prepare our students for skilled practice in the complex situations and environments where they will work. One of our efforts has focused on an upper-level undergraduate course titled Performance Technology, for which we have developed a variety of what we believe are innovative strategies and activities. Results have been encouraging and have suggested more direct and powerful links between preparation and practice.

We have a large body of literature that describes and prescribes how to design instruction but a poor understanding of what expert instructional designers actually do in practice. This paper describes a study in which expert and novice designers were asked to think aloud as they solved a design problem. The resulting protocols were analyzed and compared. Important differences were identified between experts and novices and between apparent characteristics of expertise and descriptions of instructional design in the literature. The implications of these differences for assisting and training instructional designers are discussed.