Learning From History: Chronicling the Emergence of Human Performance Technology

Human performance technology (HPT) can be defined as systems thinking applied to human resource activities. This article chronicles the emergence of HPT and identifies the significant events and efforts of key pioneers that led to the development of the HPT process model. The HPT process model is a systemic approach to analyzing performance problems that is gaining significant exposure as a bona fide mechanism to define and implement high-performance work systems in the Information Age organization. Consequently, it is important to analyze the origins of this model to better understand how the HPT process arrived at its current form.