Businesses grow because of what people do with what they know. Performance consulting plays a big role in helping leaders and teams know and do the right things. According to Dana Robinson, performance consulting is a strategic process that produces business results by enhancing performance of both people and the infrastructure of the organization. It requires a mental model that is systemic, results-focused, and solution-neutral.

For almost 30 years, Dana has assisted HR, L&D, and other talent-related functions transition from a traditional and tactical focus to a performance and strategic focus. She is the co-author of seven books, and has received numerous awards, including ATD’s Distinguished Contribution Award. In our most recent installment on interviews with experts to mark ATD’s 75th year, Eliza Blanchard, a content and community specialist at ATD, spoke to Dana about some of the trends making an impact on the field of performance consulting.

Dana believes that analytics skills—the ability to collect, analyze, and then report on data—will grow in importance. We are going to do more analytic work not just in task analysis and learning needs assessment, she says, but also gap analyses, cause analyses, and building performance models. “The ability to take data, on the small scale or large scale, cull it down to its true pattern, and share it so people can begin to make decisions from it is going to be a critical skill,” says Dana.

She adds that tolerance for ambiguity while performance consultants figure out what is really needed will also play a key role. “When we aren’t comfortable in a gray zone, we tend to jump to a solution to try and have something to do,” Dana says. “Too frequently, that’s the wrong solution or at least an incomplete one.”

For more on the trends shaping the field of talent development and some career advice for performance consultants, listen to the complete interview.