Based on the brilliant book “The Three Laws of Performance” by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
Introduction
When something isn’t working well in our work lives, we struggle with which part of the problem to tackle first. Do we start with cost reduction? What about growth? Or should we begin with better processes?
In our personal lives, it’s the same dilemma – which problem do we work on first? Should we resolve to do better with our health, finances, family or career?
We cut costs and employees get frustrated or leave. We stop smoking but gain weight. We leave the office early to spend more time with the family but the boss doesn’t like it. This is all a lot of stress – so before we know it the cigarettes are back.
People spend their lives perfecting the art of improvement – more, better, different, faster. Using this approach, many problems seem intractable. As the French proverb says, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The “Default Future”
The reason that fixing problems often doesn’t deliver expected results is that the result is only superficial. The underlying dynamics that perpetuate the problem are left untouched.
For every “problem,” there’s a future that has already been written about it. This future includes people’s assumptions, hopes, fears, resignation, cynicism and “lessons learned” through past experience. Although this future is almost never talked about, it’s the context in which people try to create change.
If you were a change manager and went into an organization with various problems, employees would almost always say “It will never work out. We’ve got too much politics” or “Our leaders cannot lead – they just don’t have the capacity” etc.
Although most people have never articulated or had a chance to articulate what they really think will happen to them personally or organizationally,
they live every moment as if it’s destined to come about. They are already heading towards the default future.
If you interviewed the leaders in this same organization, you would hear “People here don’t care and they never will. We invite their ideas but they never come“.
Rewriting the Future
Two points are crucial here. First, everyone experiences a future in front of them, even though few could articulate it. We know it’s what will happen, whether we can give words to it or not. This is the default future, and every person has one.
So does every organization.
Second, people’s relationship with the default future is complex. If someone described your default future to you, you might disagree, perhaps even get angry at how different that future is from what you think will happen. Yet you – along with the rest of us – live as if that future is preordained. You live into your default future, unaware that by doing so you’re making it come about.
Statistical evidence shows that most significant change efforts fail. The reason is that regardless of the management interventions that are tried, the default futures of employees and leaders are still in place. The more things change, the
more they stay the same.
For things to change, the future must be rewritten. The result is the transformation of a situation, leading to a dramatic elevation in performance.
Imagine if in that struggling organization, people rewrote their future. What if it was this: “We’ve turned around the company. We’re people who work together in teams, innovate and succeed.”
It’s not a matter of motivational speeches or slogans that people repeat. It’s rewriting what people know will happen. Rewrite the future, and people’s actions naturally shift: from disengaged to proactive, from resigned to inspired, from frustrated to innovative.
By the way, this happens without targeting the problems themselves. Rewrite the future and old problems disappear
The First Law
The First Law of Performance is:
How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
The first law answers the question, “Why do people do what they do?” Consider that when we do something, it always makes complete sense to us. On the other hand, when others do something, we often wonder, “Why are they doing
that? It doesn’t make any sense!” But if we got into the world of that person and looked at how the situation occurred to him, we would consider those
same actions we were questioning to be completely and absolutely the perfect and correct thing for him to do, given how the situation is occurring to that person.
We all assume that the way things occur for us is how they’re occurring for others. But situations occur differently for each person. Not realizing this can make another person’s actions seem inappropriate.
To see the reality illusion at work, think of a person you aren’t happy with at the moment – perhaps someone you’ve been resenting for years.
Think of words that describe that person. You might say “self-centered,” “doesn’t listen,” “opinionated” or “irrational.” Notice that you’ve described how
the person occurs to you. The fact that something occurs to you in a certain way does not make it absolute reality.
The Second Law
The Second Law of Performance is:
How a situation occurs arises in language.
Language is the means through which your future is already written. It’s also the means through which it can be rewritten. Language should be understood here in the broadest sense. It includes not only spoken and written communication, but also body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, pictures and drawings, music, how people dress, and any other
actions that have symbolic intent.
Untying the knots of language begins with seeing that whenever you say something, other communication is carried along with it. That phenomenon can be called the unsaid but communicated. Sometimes the sender is aware of the unsaid; often he or she is not. The unsaid is the most important part of language when it comes to elevating performance.
The unsaid but communicated includes assumptions, expectations, disappointments, resentments, regrets, interpretations, etc. When you walk into a company for a meeting, you can see instantly how the
company occurs to employees, and how people occur to each other. Like little cartoon bubbles floating over people’s heads, you can read what people aren’t saying but are communicating. The messages cover the spectrum, from “I’m so bored” to “I wonder what’s for lunch” to “My work is more important than yours.”
The process of real change starts with becoming aware of what people
aren’t saying but are communicating. It starts with people saying what they’ve been thinking – saying the unsaid. Most organizational issues or issues between people arise because of clusters of “the unsaid”. As the process continues,
people discover what’s lurking behind their thoughts and opinions.
The Third Law
The Third Law of Performance is:
Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.
There are two different ways to use language. The first is descriptive –
using language to depict or represent things as they are or have been. The test of good descriptive language is whether it accurately articulates the world as it is, whether people see the world rightly. Descriptive language is often used to look back, spot trends and predict what will happen.
Descriptive language has its limits – you can’t create something new by merely describing what was and is. Using descriptive language to talk about the future is limited to prediction based on past cycles and current reality.
Future-based language, also called generative language, has the power to create new futures, to craft vision. It doesn’t describe how a situation occurs it
transforms how it occurs. It does this by rewriting the future.
At the Polus Group, a large conglomerate built by a man of vision, Toshima Nakauchi, the default future that emerged after his incapacitating stroke – what people expected – was “the company would have no leadership because the
founder is not coming back.” That was changed through a six-month process. The goal of that process was to develop a future in which every member of the 60-person team leading the effort had an authentic voice in creating a new vision.
By replacing the default future with their own creation, people collectively lived into an optimistic, exciting future. The old problems simply dropped away, and everyone’s performance altered.
Summary
The Three Laws of Performance help you to reflect on your situation, how it shackles you and how you can create a new future by rewriting the unsaid language around you.