Perhaps the greatest difference between Human Performance Technology (HPT) models and traditional notions of instructional design is that HPT models allow for a much broader range of interventions to a given performance problem, which often include non-instructional interventions as well as those that involve instruction or training (Morrison, Ross, Kalman, & Kemp, 2013). The nice feature of HPT models is that instructional designers can use them to identify and diagnose performance problems and have a more informed approach for determining if instruction or training is the best overall solution or only part of the solution.
HPT models – and their corresponding theories – build upon the scope of instructional design (ID) by allowing the designer to address specific performance problems and opportunities situated within particular environments (Richey, Klein, and Tracey, 2011). HPT is unique in its ability to provide a wide range of potential interventions – both instructional and non-instructional – to address performance problems and opportunities due to its many influences such as behavioral psychology, systems theory and organizational development. For instance, behavioral psychology allows the instructional designer to design interventions that focus on subsystem performance improvement of “individuals and the processes they use to accomplish a task or job” (Swanson, 1999), or that focus on systems-wide improvement that affect the improvement of individuals within the larger system (Rummler & Brache, 1995; Swanson, 1999), or that cover an even wider socio-cultural performance problem that includes complex group and organizational structures and dynamics (Schwen, Kalman, & Evans, 2006). Likewise, the influence of organizational development on HPT allows for greater opportunities for the designer to devise interventions that focus on the individual improvement of those within the organization. Interventions are designed by examining and creating solutions that view individual performance issues through the lens of general management, adaptive strategies, human resource management, and change implementation measures (Beer & Walton, 1987) or through “management functions, performance systems development functions, and components of human performance systems (Jacobs, 1988, p. 2).