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The utility of clinical diagnostic reasoning in performance analysis

The effective practice of Human Resource Development (HRD) requires that interventions are based on the results of a thorough performance analysis. Practitioners are taught to recognize sub-optimal performance, collect and analyze relevant data, diagnose and draw conclusions, and then introduce rational interventions. Inherent to these analytical approaches are the cognitive processes of diagnosis or causal analysis. These cognitive processes involve a particular form of thinking that leads the analyst to conclusions about the nature of the problem or organization under study. ‘Making the diagnosis’ is therefore essential to the performance improvement process. The purpose of this article is to examine how HRD practitioners can improve the effectiveness of their diagnoses by drawing on the practices of diagnostic reasoning from the field of medicine. Diagnostic reasoning is the essential cognitive task of physicians, who rely on it to identify the underlying cause or causes of a patient’s illness. I argue that this form of reasoning has both utility and validity in organizational settings to diagnose factors and causes of substandard performance at individual, team and organizational level of analysis.