The three laws of performance

Here are 7 profound lessons from The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan: 1. The Law of Current Reality: Performance is shaped by the prevailing beliefs and assumptions within an organization. Understanding and acknowledging the current reality is essential for identifying barriers to improvement and enabling transformation. 2. The Law of Future Reality: The way people view their future influences their performance today. Creating a compelling vision for the future can inspire and motivate individuals to align their actions with that vision, fostering a proactive approach to change. 3. The Law of Language: The language we use has a profound impact on our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Zaffron emphasizes that reframing conversations and using empowering language can shift perspectives and drive performance improvements. 4. Co-Creation of Reality: Performance is not solely an individual endeavor; it is co-created within teams and organizations. Collaboration and shared commitment to goals enhance collective performance and foster a culture of accountability. 5. The Role of Context: The context in which individuals operate significantly affects their performance. Leaders can create environments that support high performance by setting clear expectations, providing resources, and cultivating a positive culture. 6. Empowerment through Ownership: Encouraging individuals to take ownership of their roles and responsibilities leads to greater engagement and performance. Zaffron advocates for fostering a sense of accountability and autonomy among team members. 7. The Importance of Feedback: Continuous feedback is essential for growth and improvement. Zaffron highlights the value of creating a culture where feedback is openly shared and seen as a tool for development rather than criticism.

A proven system for rallying all of an organizations' employees around a new vision and ideas for making the vision stick When something at work isn't going smoothly, managers struggle with what part of the problem to tackle first. Do they start with cost reduction? Or should they go for process improvements first? The authors—who have helped hundreds of companies and individuals change and improve—say spend time and money adjusting the systems in which people operate, rather than targeting people and their performance directly. The authors show that it's in fact possible to change everything at once—with a focus on making such transformations permanent and repeatable. The book outlines a process for engaging all employees to buy-in to an improved vision of an organization's new and improved future. Amazon-Exclusive Q&A with Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan Author Steve Zaffron What are the “three laws of performance”? The laws of performance are universal. That is, any time people are involved in a situation, the laws apply. They aren’t steps or tips, but general principles that are always at work. They are also phrased in a precise way, to give maximum insight and applicability. The laws are: 1. How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them. 2. How situations occur arises in language. 3. Future based language transforms how situations occur to people. In your opinion, what do leaders struggle with the most and how can the laws help them? The two biggest issues we hear from leaders are lack of buy-in and an absence in ownership. The first problem often becomes acute when the leaders, working with experts, determine what plan people should implement, and the work force doesn’t want to do it, or doesn’t engage with passion. Many leaders try to solve the resulting issues with incentives, which often make the problem worse, as Daniel Pink’s book Drive demonstrates. The second problem--absence of ownership--is related to lack of buy-in, but runs deeper. The problem, as many leaders have expressed to us, is that people don’t treat the business as though it’s their business. In some cases, it literally is their business, for example when people have some equity in the company through stock options. Yet even in many of these situations, people don’t act as though they are owners. Many leaders have expressed that nothing they ever tried has fixed the ownership problem.

The Three Laws of Performance can help with both problems by encouraging leaders to see that people’s actions are correlated to how situations occur to them. The second and third laws, taken together, say that future-based language—such as declarations, promises, and commitments—transform how situations occur to people. By focusing on the way in which things are “ occurring to the people, their actions naturally shift. The point is clear when we remember that the Declaration of Independence transformed how the experience of being a colonist occurred for the colonists. The facts hadn’t changed—the British still asserted their control. But the actions of the colonists shifted in a dance with the Declaration. What had been skirmishes by the colonists now became full-scale war and eventually the birth of a nation. Author Dave Logan The same situation happened recently in Egypt, when decades of tyrannical rule ended in 18 days. What really happened is that the situations occurred in a new way to Egyptians, and their actions naturally shifted. Imagine this level of empowerment and engagement in your organization. Using these three laws in an organization calls forth people’s participation and involvement in surprising and exciting new ways. It seems that people can apply the lessons here in many ways – how they communicate, how they think, how they act. Since publishing the hardcover version is there a “way” that stands out to you? Since we’re writing about laws, and not tips or techniques, there is not a single “way.” Rather, there is a general flow of conversations that taps into the power of the Three Laws. The flow goes something like this: 1. Ask people: what is the “default future?” That is, what do people see coming at them in the future, almost for certain and unless something completely unexpected happens? Getting and experiencing what people see as the default future gives everyone insights into how people are experiencing the organization and their opportunities in it. 2. Go deeper:, asking people: “if this default future existed throughout the organization, what actions would people find themselves taking, perhaps even without thinking?” Even though people may not want the default future, it acts as a mostly unspoken, often unconscious, self-fulfilling prophecy. People find themselves making it happen through their actions. Getting people to see their role in this process is critical. People created the default future, and are actively bringing it about. The same people can rewrite the future. 3. Ask people: “is this default future what you want?” If the answer is a resounding “no,” they have the ability to set the default future aside and create something new. 4. Invite people to consider this question: “what do you really want instead?” People should speculate until a new future—technically, called an “invented future,” takes shape. For an invented future to be effective, it must take people’s individual concerns into account, as well as the concerns of the organization and its stakeholders. 5. Develop projects that make realize an aspect of the invented future.

As people successfully implement the projects resulting from this flow, the invented future occurs as more attainable to people. Over time, people will find themselves acting in line with the invented future. There are no steps required, no need to remember to act in a certain way. Elevated performance is now natural and automatic. In your new epilogue to the paperback edition you zero on the three critical implications for leadership SINCE the first version in hardcover came out. Which one really stands out and why ? The fundamental aspect of leadership that most people miss is the importance of listening. Listening, as we describe it, is not simply gathering data and opinions from people, but rather exploring how situations occur to them, what they aspire to make happen, and what stands in their way. By listening in this way, leaders combine what they hear from lots of people into an invented future that represents the bulk of people’s concerns. When people hear the invented future, they say, “That speaks for me!” because it is, in part, their idea. Lack of buy-in and ownership are replaced with excitement, inspired action, and full engagement. People seem to describe this as a “different” type of business book? Why is that? In working with our editor, Warren Bennis, our goal was not to write another list of steps or platitudes. Frankly, such books accomplish little more than short-term motivation, or incremental improvement. Our goal was to focus on the fundamental laws that govern human performance. We didn’t set out to write a simple book, but rather, a book that would make an impact. People have told us that the Three Laws of Performance has allowed them to approach old problems in new ways, and often move to elevated performance in much shorter time, and with less effort, than they had thought possible. This book taps into what appears to be a shift in organizations to more openness, transparency etc. Do you agree? How so ? Yes, we agree. Organizations are going through a shift for a variety of reasons, perhaps most importantly the ability to connect with other people. Years ago, companies could hide activities, especially in the developing world. Today, these activities are captured by cell phones and shared on social media. There’s really no place to hide anymore. As a result, organizations need to transform adversarial relationships with governments, local populations, unions, and communities, into partnerships. Doing so requires really grasping why people do what they do. We believe the Three Laws of Performance gives leaders a unique insight into how to make this shift one in a way that inspires greater levels of satisfaction, results, and the experience of making a difference.

The law is very simple and yet we simply have no idea how deeply it affects our life and the life of the organization. The most important words here are ‘occur’ and ‘correlate’. The word ‘occur’ indicates that it is NOT what situation or a person really IS but how it OCCURS TO US that determines our behaviour. For instance, if we see a situation or person as threatening, our actions will be correlated to our perception of threat IRRESPECTIVE of the fact whether it IS threatening or not. Speaking from my own experience, my mother ‘occurred’ to me as a person who has treated my father badly and as a person who did not care for me at all. After I was able to distinguish that this is how my mother occurred to me and that was NOT how she WAS, great bitterness and anger towards her vanished. This realization transformed my behaviour towards her so much that I don’t fight with her at all after this. When this bitterness and anger and fights disappeared, there was unprecedented peace and affinity in my life. In fact, before this realization, when my psychotherapist had asked me to tell him ‘three good qualities’ of my mother I could not even tell him one! So much was the anger and resentment I was carrying around. How situations or person occur to us is closely dependent on Zaffron and Logan term as ‘default future’. Default Future, according to the authors, is our future which we SEE as certainly coming unless something dramatic and unexpected happens. This ‘default future’ does not include the inevitable things like death or ageing. It includes the things like ‘how your evening will turn out’ or what you will be doing tomorrow, unless something unexpected happens for instance. We know this future at the gut level. If we know we are going to meet someone we love in the evening, our present becomes something else and if we know that she or he has changed the plan our present becomes something else. In fact, it is not our past that controls our life; it is our ‘default future’ which controls our life. Our present moment, our activities in the present are CORRELATED to how our FUTURE OCCURS to us this moment. That is, our present way of being and acting is a function of our ‘default future’. If we see in the morning when we wake up that it is going to be ‘the same routine day’ in our default future, our actions will be correlated to this perception. If we receive a phone call informing us of something totally unexpected, our morning changes for better or for worse. Imagine, a phone call informing us that we have won something by the sale scheme we got yesterday while shopping. Or imagine a call telling us about our application for something has been turned down. It changes our present way of being and acting. What applies to us as individuals applies for the institutions and organization. The way people in the organization are working at present is correlated to their ‘default future’. If it is bleak and uninspiring, people’s activities will be correlated to this perception. The question which comes to our mind now is HOW a situation (or a person) occurs to us the way it does? What made my mother occur to me the way she did? This brings us to the second law of performance.

Simple again. How my mother occurred to me was based on what I kept SAYING to myself over and over again in my mind to myself or to her openly. I kept on saying, ‘she does not care for me or for my father. She treats him badly’. Remember this saying was not always conscious, it was often at the ‘gut level’. I ran this conversation repeatedly and every time I repeated it my anger went up exponentially. My feelings, expectations and beliefs are nothing but my conversations with myself and they determine how someone occurs to me. If I keep saying, as I did, that this is an ‘arranged marriage’ and there is no space for love in it, there wasn’t any. Conversations are verbal and nothing is ‘just words’. Our feelings and emotions are correlated to our words. The ‘default future’ is a conversation we have with ourselves at the gut level. If you look at the conversation I had about my mother ‘she does not care for me at all and she treats my father badly’, you will realize that it started in the PAST, and that it uses language to DESCRIBE what my mother IS. This is a past-based use of language and it is mostly ‘descriptive’. In this use of language situation (or a person) ‘IS’ the way it is. When I describe something by saying it is the way it is, I m speaking from my past experience. For instance, if I say, as I have said often, ‘the most of the teachers in the colleges and universities are not really eligible for the job’, that is how I will see them, that is, this is how they will occur to me and how I behave with them is correlated to how they occur to me. Zaffron and Logan call this ‘reality illusion’, the illusion that reality IS the way it OCCURS to us. It is the illusion that reality is ‘fixed’ and is independent of our conversations. . This is similar to what structuralists and poststructuralist philosophers (under influence of Heidegger) have been pointing out. That doesn’t mean, they point out, there is no ‘reality’ ‘out there’, but they emphasize that we cannot access it without language. My reality illusion was ‘this is how my mother is’. When we realize that there is no ‘fixed and stable’ reality existing independently of our conversation, reality becomes ‘malleable’ to us. We can now ‘rewrite’ our future. Now if our performance is correlated to how situation occurs to us and how a situation occurs to us is due the language we use to talk about it to ourselves with others, how can we transform our performance? We can transform our performance by transforming our language (not ‘changing’ it mind you, this is not a book about ‘positive thinking’) and consequently transforming the way the situation occurs to us. Most of our conversations are past based. Our complaints, our expectations, our intentions, our communication strategies that we use to get results all are based on our past. There is nothing wrong with this, except for the fact that most of us put them into our future most of the time. Zaffron and Logan call this ‘filing error’. The stuff that should go into the box file labeled ‘past’ should go into that file; however, it goes into the file labeled ‘future’. My conversation,’ mine is an arranged marriage and there is no scope for love’ came from some past conversations; however, by putting it into my ‘default future’, it controls my present. I don’t see any scope for love to exist at present. The ‘filing error’ makes me see my marriage as a closed space. There is no possibility of love here. I can see a possibility only when I put my past based conversation to where it belongs to the file called past only then can I see some ‘space’ some possibility in my default future and hence in my present as my present. This practice of rectifying the ‘filing error’ by putting the files from my past back into my past instead of my default future is called ‘completion’. This completion opens up a blank space from which new possibility can be created. How can I create a new possibility?

The Third Law: Future-based language transforms how situation occur to people. By declaring your commitment to create a new possibility and keeping your word, you can create new future from the cleared space in the ‘default future’. The future based speech acts like, ‘I will do………………’, ‘I will create’ or ‘I declare the possibility of being…………..’ actually can CREATE new future. If you don’t believe this, just look at your past. When I was a very young child I said to my self, ‘I am not wanted, I am unwanted’ and I became ‘unwanted’ in my eyes. People said they loved me but as I saw myself as ‘unwanted’, I did not believe them. I thought they were manipulating me. Here was a classic ‘filing error’; I was putting my past based conversation into future. When I dropped this conversation, I no longer feel ‘unwanted’. I can sense that people want me and love me, in their own ways. But the statement ‘ I am unwanted’ is actually nothing but a speech act. A verdict that I passed on myself: I was the judge, the jury, the advocate and the culprit at the same time. I BELIEVED in it, it was ‘TRUTH’ to me. If this decade old statement determined all my past, a speech act based in future can create my future. The future based language, or what Zaffron and Logan call, ‘generative language’ is not an empty ‘ positive thinking’ as it comes from the space in default future cleared up by putting past into past, it comes out of a perception of possibility. Most of the ‘positive thinking’ fails because one does not SEE POSSIBILITY in this thinking. If I SEE myself sitting in front of a hungry lion, no amount of positive thinking can actually CONVINCE me that I won’t be eaten, unless I see that it is actually chained to the tree. No completion (rectifying the ‘filing error’), no possibility, no possibility, no new future. Zaffron and Logan make a very interesting use of the term ‘integrity’, which is at heart of creating a future. According to Logan and Zaffron, ‘integrity’ has nothing to do with ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’ as it is commonly understood. It has nothing to do with right or wrong. It has everything to do with ‘workability’ in our life. Integrity, according to the authors, means keeping your word, honoring your word. If you don’t keep your word, the work cannot be done. If you cease to honour your word, people will be even quicker to cease to honour it. Integrity, according to Zaffron and Logan, is ‘being whole or complete’. A chair with one leg missing has no workability; a wheel with one spoke missing has no workability. Only when it is restored can there be any workability in life. A chair with a broken leg is not ‘bad or wrong’, a wheel with a broken spoke is not ‘bad or wrong’, it simply doesn’t WORK. The key to rewriting a new future is by using future based language and with integrity. This is a book about results and not about ideas. This is a book which leads to action. Reflections and insights are usually dime a dozen. This is a book which is not concerned with ‘explanation’ or ‘understanding’, but with performance: as a leader, as a father, as a teacher, as a doctor, as a brother, as a daughter, as a friend, as an employee, as an employer, as a businessman and as anyone. The book, the authors tell us, can be our coach in this game of life. If we sit and argue with our coach about theoretical niceties, we won’t be on the court. So I recommend this book about anyone who wants to act effectively and powerfully so as to get the results one wants. So get hold of a copy and get on the playground! Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of your Organization and your Life, San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2009 Distributed in India by the Times Books, Rs. 395

One of those difficult-to-rate books. It certainly delivers less than you would expect from the summary, but, unlike many bad books out there, at least it delivers something. The quality of the book is not consistent, as the "something" delivered is all concentrated in the first half, where the core concepts are presented. The second half tried to discuss the application of those concepts, and that's where the book goes downhill. The advice provided sounds like a compilation of a plethora of other leadership books, with a whole self-help tone that will definitely annoy those who don't enjoy such kind of books. On the good side, some of the concepts presented here can be really useful and worth your read. The "default future" concept was my favorite, it's so true & real that I would say that almost everyone will relate to it some way or another. It sounds obvious after you read it, but you probably never stopped to think about it in that way. Other concepts of the book can also fall into a similar category. Although many of them definitely weren't presented here for the first time ever, I would give a thumbs-up for the way the authors organize them. On the bad side, the book will disappoint those who expected something minimally scientific, like me. Like I said before, the second half is the ultimate self-help segment, but even the first one in some way would fit into that category as well. Authors say what their concepts are, and give example of situations in which they have worked, but they don't really ask themselves WHY they work. Having read some cognitive & behavioral science books in the past, in some occasions I could relate part of my reading background to what was being discussed. In that sense, I would expect that the authors delved a little more on the WHY as well, instead of just focusing on the WHAT and HOW. Overall, I don't intend to persuade you to discard the book once and for all - as I said, it has a few useful ideas in it - but I wouldn't recommend you to put it in your priority list, especially if you wouldn't enjoy books that are on the self-help borderline.