An Updated Framework for Human Performance Improvement in the Workplace: The Spiral HPI Framework

The current human performance technology (HPT) model has remained largely unchanged since its introduction 17 years ago. This model and its cousins are implicitly, if not explicitly, linear in nature, visually encouraging practitioners to complete earlier phases before later ones. This article proposes a spiral human performance improvement (HPI) framework to capture what is happening in savvy practitioners' heads and what is happening over time as those practitioners move through the performance improvement (PI) process in the often messy and chaotic real world. The intent is not to replace existing models but rather to give us a different way to visualize, think about, and discuss how experts approach the PI process in the real world without being overly prescriptive. The spiral HPI framework provides a different way of seeing that dynamic process and having those discussions.