What's a Human Performance Specialist? How about human factors consultant or a human factors practitioner?
Have you ever felt your heart pick up the pace, your mind race, your soul and body moved as you learn something new? How about when your "spidey" senses tell you this is big?
That's how it felt when I read Dr. Klein wrote on Psychology Today: A New Term: Human Performance Specialists. He writes: "According to the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society website, it is a scientific discipline trying to understand how people interact with other elements of a system. It tries to create designs that optimize human well-being and overall system performance. Got it? That’s one of the official definitions, and frankly, it doesn’t seem particularly clear or compelling."
Except, it's clear to me.
Who thought of a door-knob when a door handle works better? You can use a foot, hip, or elbow to open a door handle when your hands are full, not a knob. He writes, how about when you "pull a door that needs to be pushed?" Or "... spend way too long trying to navigate a confusing website" I still don't understand why websites are so convoluted or why computer desktops are rectangular when my mind is round and organizes data in pie charts.
According to Dr. Klein, this discipline focuses on making things usable for people. The article is about how the professional title means little to most people. How about Coaching? A Coach is not someone who asks you to drop and do 30 pushups. A true coach is someone who raises your level of awareness. A Coach asks you questions so that you understand what it is you want to understand. But try explaining that to people. It is not easy.
Dr. Klein breaks the Human Performance Specialist into two groups, those working on mental performance such as decision making, and those working on physical performance, more on the physical side of things. He goes on to suggest the following nine levers.
1) Clarifying goals.
2) Structuring the decisions
3) Providing training
4) Developing checklists and procedure guides
5) Offering incentives
6) Applying principles of behavioral engineering
7) Selecting good people
8) Using information technology
9) Designing better organizations.
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How cool is that?
