SPECIAL FEATURE: KNOW YOUR COLLEAGUES—ROSE BAKER AND JOHN TURNER

Abstract

IN THIS SECTION, Dr. Judith Hale interviews International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) Members so that readers can learn about colleagues. She is featuring a new member (an emerging or reemerging professional), along with a notable long-term member of the Society. Rose Baker serves on the ISPI Board of Directors, as our treasurer, and as the associate editor for Performance Improvement Quarterly (PIQ). John Turner serves as editor-in-chief for PIQ and also serves on ISPI’s Publications Committee.I have always looked at performance as a mixture of factors. The context in which the performance is occurring is as important as the skillset and desire of the person performing. When I was teaching, I designed and delivered instruction that worked to maximize the opportunity for success and to minimize the elements that would compete with success.In 1997, I took a year sabbatical to complete the classes for a master’s degree in adult education. My advisor said to go to the library and look through all the journals to find one that had articles on topics that were of interest to me. After reviewing about 100 journals, I selected Performance Improvement Quarterly. The articles within the issues on the shelf talked of evaluation and performance improvement. I wrote to one of the authors of an article, and she quickly replied with recommendations for additional reading on the topic.In 1998, I started the coursework for a PhD in Instructional Systems. One of the courses in which I enrolled used an excerpt of Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model, the ACORN test, and performance improvement plan calculations. This matched how I considered performance and gave me a way to assess and evaluate where to place effort for the most effective interventions. I could see how the philosophical foundations for an organization influenced and were influenced by the organization’s culture, policies, strategies, and tactics. I could see how many organizations were mired in the logistics of assigning tasks to workers and did not think about how the factors were interrelated and dependent upon each other.In 2011, I decided that ISPI should be my professional home; I was in a position to be able to dedicate time and effort as an active member of the society. In 2015, a change in employment allowed me to further commit to engagement with ISPI committees and research to advance what is known about performance improvement and its applications in the workplace.During a course in 1998, the professor of the class asked me to describe what I had read and how I could apply the section we were assigned to read for class. After I was finished describing how I had applied what we had read to the performance of an employee at a local sewing factory near where I lived, another student in the class asked me if I had read something more than what we were assigned because he did not distill from the reading what I had distilled. The behavior engineering model made sense to me, and I could envision from the story the sewing worker told the professor the incentives and disincentives of the employment, how the employer affected her performance and her pay, and how her knowledge and capacity drove her performance levels as well as the information that was available from the employer. Her sewing chair was a special chair that had an adjustable height that helped her to be able to sew more items per hour than others in the factory, who had stationary chairs. This opened my eyes to how something as simple as a chair could determine quality of life differences. For my course project, I applied the principles and concepts to a local plant that prepared leather for car seats. That same year, I had purchased a car whose leather seats had components that had been processed in that facility. The impact of simple elements of work by an individual in a role can have long reaching effects.This work started a chain of research that includes the emergence of leadership, how systems impact teams and team leadership, and how project management can be influenced by performance within and outside of the project team.I want people to perceive that I was helpful. A long time ago, I was a Brownie Girl Scout and had the motto, “Do a good turn daily.” Hopefully, I have fulfilled this in others’ eyes, and I will be able to continue to provide efforts to do something helpful every day. I am a perpetual learner. Colleagues once told me that they could put me in one of those solid white rooms, and I would learn something. Each day, I have topics that I read and study so that I will have learned something new that day. I am also curious about how things work and how people interact with each other. These qualities support my teaching, research, and service goals and efforts.Currently, I am an associate professor at the University of North Texas in the Department of Learning Technologies. In this role, I am the director of our Learning Technologies Bachelor of Applied Science undergraduate degree program. I hold and have held leadership roles on department, college, and university committees, such as the executive, personnel affairs, undergraduate curriculum, graduate curriculum, evaluation of university administrators, and bylaws committees. I enjoy knowing and applying policies to influence the philosophy, culture, and strategic direction of the university, college, and department. This past year, I was selected to participate in the Leadership Fellows program to learn more about university administration. I serve on the Faculty Senate, and I am the election judge in my department.Within ISPI, I serve as the treasurer of the Society. Coupled with my passions for policy are my efforts to manage the fiscal elements of the Society in a responsible manner. The day-to-day management of funds draws on my project management knowledge and skills; I am a PMP® through the Project Management Institute. I am also engaged with the leadership of IPSI EMEA and other professional societies. I am a coauthor of Successful Project Management, 7th Edition.The best ways to reach me are via my university email and phone: rose.baker@unt.edu, (940) 369-7684. I can also be reached through my ISPI emails, rosebaker@ispi.org or finance@ispi.org. My X (formerly Twitter) account is @rmb194. I have a LinkedIn presence at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rose-baker-1bb43b5. My research can be found through my digital IDs: ORCID: 0000-0003-2191-0436; ResearcherID: D-2994-2016.Dr. Rose Baker is an associate professor in the Department of Learning Technologies, College of Information, University of North Texas. Her research includes open learning, management techniques and statistical applications for operations and performance improvement, survey and evaluation design, theory development, and game design. Rose holds a PhD in Instructional Systems and an M.Ed. in Adult Education Theory and Practice from The Pennsylvania State University and a B.A. in Mathematics and Chemistry from Washington and Jefferson College, and she is certified as a PMP® by the Project Management Institute. She is the associate editor of Performance Improvement Quarterly and the ISPI treasurer. She has presented at many ISPI annual conferences, fall symposia, and ISPI EMEA. Rose was a member of a local student chapter at The Pennsylvania State University during her doctoral work and then rejoined ISPI in 2011. She joined ISPI Texas in 2016 and has served as the Vice President for Community Service.My background is in engineering, where I worked for 15 years before continuing my education and becoming a professor. Because of my engineering background, I could easily understand systems and processes as well as view things from a systems theoretical perspective. It was later, when I was working toward my master’s degree in human resource development (HRD) from the University of Texas at Tyler (UTT), that I began to understand the human aspect of systems. I was first introduced to ISPI and HPT during my graduate studies at UTT and the University of North Texas (UNT). This was the inflection point for me. I began to view humans (individuals, teams, multiteam systems) in open and closed systems (e.g., organizations).Family first. My incredibly supportive wife, Jana, and my son, Clark, have always accepted my busy schedule. Perhaps it has worked well because I usually work from home.Second, I am proud of some of the work that I have done with industry partners over the years. I believe in crossing the theory-practice divide. I do not think one person can do this alone (i.e., academic or executive). I believe that there must be a collaboration between academia and industrial partners. This collaboration is one thing that I have focused on, and I feel it has produced some great products.I cocreated The Flow System (TFS; https://www.getflowtrained.com) and coauthored “The Flow System: The Evolution of Agile and Lean Thinking in an Age of Complexity” (https://library.unt.edu/aquiline-books/flow-058-8). I developed a series of online training courses concentrated around The Flow System, and we have face-to-face workshops that we have performed nationally and internationally.This is a difficult question. Hopefully, people will not have any reason to say anything negative about me. I try to stay focused on my work and let it speak for itself. I utilize the peer review process provided by the scientific community to test new ideas and to see which ideas or theories are acceptable. When people speak of me, I hope they discuss the latest theories or concepts I published and presented, rather than any personal characteristics. I try to remain collaborative, open to different opinions, and objective, rather than subjective. If people’s comments about me reflect this, then I am satisfied.I try to work with my graduate students to help them publish and successfully defend their dissertation research studies. Over the years, I have collected several references that have benefited students during this process. I recently developed a website dedicated to helping graduate students (https://professor-turner.com). I will continue to develop this website with feedback from my graduate students. I hope this will be a successful endeavor and resonate with graduate students in general as well as with the students I specifically supervise. I hope that several graduate students will find this resource beneficial and will reference it when they speak of me as a professor.I have been working on the how-to book for The Flow System. While the first book was the science behind The Flow System, this book is the how-to guide. “The Flow System Playbook” will present over 36 methods, techniques, and tools that leaders, managers, and practitioners can utilize when dealing with ambiguity and complexity in the workplace. This playbook will provide worksheets to help readers start applying the methods and will include over 400 figures that help solidify the learning of each method. “The Flow System Playbook” should be available shortly, with an estimated availability date of September 2023. It should be available by the time this interview article is published.I continuously try to work on research projects with my students and recent graduates. I am working on a research project that is looking at team learning. This project involves three graduates (two from UNT), two graduate students from UNT, and one graduate student from UTT. I have found that the literature is incomplete in presenting a complete team learning theory. Through this research, I plan to systematically review the literature to show what knowledge exists (as-is state) and present a comprehensive theory of team learning (should-be state).I am working with a few University of North Texas colleagues to initiate a Sensemaking Research Center (SMRC). This SMRC will be the first of its kind in the United States (and internationally, as best as we know). We will conduct research and solicit grants by applying sensemaking methods. We also plan on providing training and publications (articles, books) on sensemaking that are produced by SMRC affiliate partners (bridging the theory-practice gap).I have been working on a new decision-making book, “Decision-making in Radical Uncertainty”. This book will present a new decision-making typology, highlighting the benefit of distributed decision-making while providing a series of techniques to aid in the practice of distributed decision-making.I can be reached through several methods, listed below:Academic E-mail: john.turner@unt.eduPersonal/General E-mail: jrthpt@gmail.comProfessor Turner E-mail: professorturner01@gmail.comTFS E-mail: john.turner@flowconsortium.comSchedule an appointment: bookjohn.netProfessor Turner began his engineering career, where he was employed for 15 years, with Asea Brown Boveri (ABB). He worked in the power generation services division and traveled internationally throughout the United States (China, 2 years; South Korea, 1.5 years; Argentina, 6 months). Professor Turner then continued his education where he received a second bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, a master’s degree in Human Resource Development (HRD) from the University of Texas at Tyler, and a PhD in Applied Technology & Performance Improvement (ATPI) from the University of North Texas (UNT). Professor Turner is an associate professor at the University of North Texas (UNT) in the College of Information.Professor Turner is the cocreator of The Flow System and a coauthor of “The Flow System Playbook”, “The Flow System: The Evolution of Agile and Lean Thinking in an Age of Complexity”, “The Flow System Guide”, and “The Flow System: Key Principles and Attributes”. Professor Turner is the current editor-in-chief for the refereed publication titled Performance Improvement Quarterly and has published more than 60 articles in various journals and book chapters. He cofounded The Flow Consortium, LLC, and Performance Development Network, LLC.