In the postwar period, application of the Instructional Systems Design (ISD) model was not consistently returning the desired improvements to organizational performance.
The origins of HPT can be primarily traced back to the work of Thomas Gilbert, Geary Rummler, Karen Brethower, Roger Kaufman, Bob Mager, Donald Tosti, Lloyd Homme and Joe Harless.
A major factor in the rise to prominence of what would become HPT was the publication of Analyzing Performance Problems in 1970 by Robert F. Mager and Peter Pipe.
The Further Reading section of the 1970 edition of their book also cites a seminal paper by Karen S. Brethower: "Maintenance Systems: The Neglected Half of Behavior Change," which contains an early version of a performance deficiency analysis algorithm developed by Geary Rummler, then at the University of Michigan.
More specifically, it is a process of selection, analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation of programs to most cost-effectively influence human behavior and accomplishment.
The International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) codified a series of Standards in an effort to raise the quality of HPT practice: