Culturally and Geographically Relevant Performance Interventions

This article attempts to showcase how one particularly financially endowed organization is seeking to modify its instructional and organizational practice to better serve its Iñupiat (Eskimo) target/client population. This is an extreme and instructive situation of socio-cultural tension that provides interesting contrasts with the issues of performance in culturally diverse corporations, governmental and non-governmental organizations. Considering the thematic argument made in this issue that multiple levels of analysis are sometimes required in developing human performance interventions in complex socio-cultural contexts, this author observed that running a school system conceived almost entirely along Western lines while serving a predominantly non-Western population leads to some problems at the macro, meso, and micro levels. This strongly suggests that, in today's cross- and multi-cultural organizational contexts, human performance technology (HPT) analyses and interventions must unearth the rich complexity of issues embedded in our increasingly complex world or suffer the consequences of doing more harm than good.