Thiagi: A Profile

by Deb Haney & Sheryl Narahara

Question: What do games, fun, and money passed out during training have in common? Answer: Learning and behavior changes ... when Thiagi is involved.

Sivasailam Thiagarajan is best known simply as Thiagi, and understandably so, for the convenience of the "locals" in America, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere. Thiagi's involvement in training and performance technology started in Chennai (originally known as Madras), India, where he was born into a family of schoolteachers. That family connection continues today; Thiagi's wife teaches, and their son writes computer-based training for Workshops by Thiagi. Thiagi's early career as a high school physics teacher shaped his basic approaches to corporate training. Standing in front of an audience, either teaching or training, is an opportunity to inspire and motivate people.

While teaching in India, Thiagi read educational psychology and technology books from England and United States. Among them were articles by George Leonard and B. F. Skinner on programmed instruction. Thiagi began writing his own programmed instruction, and sent a copy of one to the National Center for Educational Research and Training. They responded, and that correspondence eventually led to Thiagi being discovered by a psychology professor at Indiana University in 1967. Starting in the psychology department, Thiagi soon transferred to the instructional technology department because the graduate funding was better. The transition from student to professional took place while he completed his doctorate. While at Indiana, he administered a series of grant-funded projects to develop games and audio-visual training materials. Thiagi's strong streak of independence led to his starting his own company, Workshops by Thiagi, which conducts HPT and ID work globally.

Thiagi considers a variety of people to have been his mentors. Perhaps the most inspiring of these was Susan Markle, at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Thiagi took a workshop from her, and Dr. Markle ended up acting as a content expert and informal ID reviewer for Thiagi's train-the-trainer family planning work in India. Another mentor was Douglas Ellson, a psychology professor at Indiana, where Thiagi was his graduate assistant. From ID and HPT, the names of four mentors will be familiar. Howard Levie and Mac Fleming were ID professors from IU. Bob Mager and Tom Gilbert were role models as corporate consultants.

These were the early mentors and role models. However, the single greatest source of influence on his work, and from whom he is still learning 30 years later, is the group of people whose behavior he is trying to change: the countless learners in his workshops, presentations, and seminars. Thiagi learned his game design skills from watching the players. He learned his workshop skills from the participants' feedback.

Thiagi's approach to his work is based in his personal philosophy. Embrace contradictions; in his last lifetime, Thiagi believed in reincarnation, but in this lifetime, he does not. Don't take yourself too seriously. Don't take the field too seriously either -- be able to make fun of it. He views his role in ISPI to be that of court jester (and this from a past president with numerous awards and honors...). Thiagi thinks that the most important skill for a performance technologist is to not rigidly believe or adhere to any one thing. There is no one simple right way to do something. Eclecticism allows flexibility and options.

The aspect of Thiagi's philosophy that has the most impact on his work is his belief in having fun. He would like his epitaph to say that he dropped dead in the middle of a workshop while making people laugh. He views enjoyment, for both the participants and the trainer, as an important quality criterion. Enjoyment of training supports improvement in performance. Anyone who has attended a Thiagi workshop for the first time will be struck by how different it is compared to most other workshops. The energy level, the eagerness, the fun -- all are apparent.

The participants in Thiagi's workshops have a lot of fun because they are usually playing games. Thiagi's framegames are an activity "shell" to hold the content that is to be learned. Framegames evolved from his teaching days in India. The underlying principles are active learning and much interaction between players. The framegame becomes a structure for cooperative learning: the players teach each other. In a game, the participants get immediate feedback, which is important to learning.

Train-the-trainer work has been his company's mainstay for many years. Currently, Thiagi is involved in leadership and management training. He deliberately chooses as much variety as possible in his project topics, interventions, and clients. He designs job aids, motivation systems, incentive systems, and expert systems, in addition to training. His clients range from banks to power companies to manufacturers to consulting companies. Changing the types of challenges keeps him alert and happy.

Thiagi has noticed a change in his clients over the years. Before, they were stable bureaucracies, such as banks and airlines. Now, they are likely to be start-up companies. The layers of management are getting fewer, workers and communication are increasingly global, and diversity is much greater, even in formerly provincial cultures. These factors, plus technology and teamwork, are the top forces driving change. Performance technologists will have to deal with this kind of work world.

Thiagi got into HPT the way most of his peers did: he started out in instructional design, with a focus on performance outcomes. Seeing that the training did not always result in sustained changes in human performance led to additional interventions. Thiagi became a performance technologist because he saw that ID was not enough. He thinks that sometimes the best instructional designers make the worst performance technologists because they are too analytical and systematic. The best performance technologists are the ones who can change their approach -- systematic one day, creative chaos the next. Simplifying sometimes, and sometimes deliberately complicating things. Thiagi thinks that currently the best way for someone to become a performance technologist is to take an eclectic approach. No solid interdisciplinary HPT program exists. Start with instructional design as a discipline and move beyond it. Moderate the bias towards training by taking courses that are different from each other but which have the common theme of improving human performance. Study organizational behavior, recreation, and educational psychology. Start including performance technology interventions with the training. Remember that HPT goes beyond any one type of intervention. And, most of all, have fun.