Part of the ISPI Renaissance Revival Series, honoring the masters who built this field.

When disruption hits, every industry falls into a familiar pattern: sprint forward, adopt whatever is newest, rebrand, pivot. The underlying assumption is that the past has nothing useful to offer a world that looks nothing like it used to.

I want to challenge that assumption. Right now, as the performance improvement field is drowning in AI tools, quick-fix frameworks, and solution-first thinking, the most radical thing ISPI can do is go back. Not back out of nostalgia, but because the people who built this field alreadysolved many of the problems that we are facing today.

In our ongoing Training Masters Revival Series, we recently featured a conversation with Guy W. Wallace. Guy is an ISPI legend, a former ISPI President, our 2010 Honorary Life Member, and a practitioner who has spent decades consulting for Fortune 500 companies.

During the interview, Guy made a point that goes straight to the heart of why we need a Renaissance, and specifically, why we need the Revival pillar. He said:

"When the Society (ISPI) promotes HPT, they need to present it as something more holistic, more of the systems view, and more of all the variables, not just knowledge and skills. And not just the 'human,' because the human has to work the environment. You can dig a canal using a shovel or a bulldozer. What tools do we have for the people so they can do a better job, a higher quality job at a lower cost?"

That quote captures a defining difference between the training industry and the performance improvement discipline.

When a canal isn’t being dug fast enough, the training instinct is to build a module on “resilience in digging” or run a workshop on “advanced shovel techniques.” The performance technologist’s instinct is to examine the environment and ask why we aren’t using a bulldozer.

The Systems View is Our Differentiator

Performance improvement isn’t about fixing people. It’s about designing the whole system so that people can succeed.

When we isolate the “human” variable from the environment people operate in, we set them up to fail. We give them knowledge and skills, then send them back into broken workflows, misaligned incentives, and outdated toolsets. That is not a failure of the worker. It is a failure of the system.

Look at how most organizations are approaching Artificial Intelligence today. Many are treating it like a shovel, building isolated “AI training programs” to upskill the human, without redesigning the organizational environment to support an AI-enabled workflow.

If we apply Guy’s systems view, the conversation changes. AI is the new bulldozer. But if we don’t examine the whole environment, the processes, the data governance, and the managerial support, we will be handing people bulldozers while leaving them trapped in a canal designed for shovels.

What Revival Actually Means

When we named Revival as the first pillar of the ISPI Renaissance, we weren’t talking about sentimentality. We were talking about intellectual honesty. The performance improvement field has a body of knowledge that is rigorous, systemic, and capable of producing results that training and talent development alone cannot.

We do not need to reinvent the systems view. We need to re-inhabit it. That is the case for going back. Not because the future isn’t real (it is, and ISPI is leading the charge with frameworks like AI4PI), but because the diagnostic rigor and systems thinking that will make us useful in that future are already in our archives, waiting to be applied.

Guy Wallace spent a career proving that the systems view works. The least we can do is listen.

Watch the full conversation with Guy W. Wallace here, and let us know: where do you see systems thinking missing in your world?

by Dr. Lynne M. MacBain, CPT, CAIT

Join us in the ISPI Renaissance

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Become a Member: Connect with a global community of systems thinkers and performance technologists.

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