Here’s a happens-every-day scenario – maybe it even happened to you, today.

We have a large population of people in America who cannot go anywhere without their GPS. Even to places in their own town that they truly, were able to find, on their own, just four or five years ago. But now, they must take their mobile performance support system with them. They have become completely dependent on “the box.”

They do not have the skills to think their way through a route by, say, using a map, perhaps they have never even learned to read a map!. They cannot get themselves out of a bad situation if their GPS leads them astray (which happens often) and they absolutely cannot get “there” again, in the future, without the assistance of the GPS again.

It is really quite remarkable how quickly (in just 4 or 5 years!) people have given over their independent thought and capabilities to a support system. Even more amazing is the number of times the support system can be wrong, and people still rely on it more than their own knowledge, skill or abilities.

This worries us when you consider how rapidly “training” is becoming just in time instruction. Yes, the proliferation of apps and help utilities are wonderful assistance, but are they training our workers to stop thinking and wait until someone or something tells them what to do? What if the server is down? Will our workers just sit there, stupefied, until the electronic support is operational again?