Studies & Articles

Reprinted from the September 2001 Issue of Monitor Leasing & Financial Services

Corporate Culture

An organization's focus and attention on attracting, developing and raising the performance level of its people can give it a strategic advantage. There are many ways to view this such as offering competitive salaries and benefits, providing career planning processes, stock ownership, etc. A unique perspective and approach our company is expert in is that of transforming corporate culture. This allows a company to create itself as an employer of choice and provides an inspiring environment for people to work in as part of a high performance team producing breakthrough results. I will summarize our unique approach with comments from experts and managers we have worked with.

"Critical to business success [is] the need to align workers with business strategies and to deal with the factors that drive human performance.

"Culture, values, and human behavior, often described as soft issues, are as important to success as hard issues such as finance, structure, and work processes. The soft issues are in many ways the hardest issues, and, around the world, senior executives are struggling to deal with them." (Excerpted from "Competing in a Global Economy" Watson Wyatt Insider)

Network of Conversations

Corporate culture in an organization can be looked at as a network of conversations. Our work is based on the paradigm that people's behavior is a function of conversation; how they see the world and how they talk about it to themselves and others. All too often, within a short period, perhaps three months, a new employee has a set way of seeing their organization and a lot of that conversation revolves around complaining and gossiping about "the way things are around here." People have difficult experiences and get stuck in "talking about the past" and resenting events that happened. Managers protect their "turf" and resist changes. It's no wonder that those conversations, and ways of seeing their work, do not lead to productive behavior and attitudes. This kind of environment is not conducive to attracting and retaining talented people. We can talk about motivation and all the rest, but when push comes to shove, behavior is really a function of how people see things. For example, a task seen by one person as challenging may inspire action. That same task seen by a different person as difficult may inspire reticence. The tasks are the same, what is different is the person's conversation.

A challenge in many organizations today is that they are limited by their organizational paradigms. When an organization's paradigm becomes the only way of doing things, the organization loses flexibility and opportunity. It is not the kind of organization that attracts talented and creative people looking for challenges and leadership opportunities. Much of management attention is devoted to the tools and techniques that squeeze more out of the existing paradigm. When the competitive environment pushes an organization to its limits, the old paradigm no longer holds. People become disenchanted, cynical and resigned. In these types of environment, turnover increases, particularly among employees that the organization does not want to lose.

Most companies plan for futures that are too small, and in doing so they only leave room for the inevitable or the predictable. They most often design their strategy on the basis of their ability to match their existing resources with their ambitions. People are scaling down their aspirations and ambitions to fit their resources. Only when a company's aspirations and desires lie outside its resources does creativity occur. Organizations must invent new ways of competing and changing the game. Creating this environment attracts and retains talented people who want to participate in creating extraordinary results.

Three Levels of Conversation

Creating powerful conversations that shape the environment of an organization will leverage the ability of an organization to attract, retain and access the creativity and talent of its people.

Our work with organizations and businesses is based on the premise that conversations take place at three levels or dimensions in an organization. These levels are not hierarchical and therefore they are more like dimensions then steps on a ladder.

The first level of conversation is the executive level. At this level, conversation around strategy takes place. A future for the organization is created, including values. Strategic outcomes and milestones are generated. Companies we have worked with generally form a cross section of their organization to generate this conversation. Including as many people in the organization both directly and indirectly in this conversation develops employee commitment and gives the organization an identity that attracts people to work for that organization.

"Building a business-focused, value-based organization is one of the critical tasks facing any company with global aspirations. We worked with a broad cross section of our work force to develop business-based values that everyone could passionately embrace." (Brad Mills, Chief Strategic Officer, BHP)

The second level of conversation is the individual level. This conversation allows each and every employee to develop powerful leadership conversations that make a difference in their day-to-day work. People distinguish their unproductive conversations such as gossiping, complaining, and blaming others. New conversations for creating commitment and developing high performance teams and breakthrough projects are designed. Our experience is that when people see themselves as leaders that make a difference in their organization, turnover is dramatically reduced. "In a high-tech industry, remaining successful and being competitive require real agility and the ability to constantly innovate and come out with new technology in a timely way. In addition to reducing product development time, shortening the cycle, and producing incremental improvements, we wanted something new, fresh; really a breakthrough result. The process we used was designed to revitalize the culture to refocus employees on driving results, welcoming and even initiating change, and creating a new leadership role in our company. It successfully incorporates employees in the company's future, gaining widespread commitment to growth and change." (Beverly Mehlhoff, Director, Employee Education and Development Worldwide, Guidant Corporation)

Finally, there is conversation that comprises the operational level. This is the level where projects are created and executed by teams through which the organization can achieve its strategic goals. Simply said, these are the conversations where teams of people coordinate their actions to achieve monthly, quarterly and annual operating plans.

"We worked with senior management to design a process where we could create and deliver on goals that were stretch goals; new world records that had never been obtained before. Our objective was to take incredibly good managers and turn them into exceptional leaders who could produce another world record. The outcomes were incredible. We not only met what we considered stretch budgets, we exceeded them. Our costs are lower than they were when we started the program, and we were able to improve safety by 50%. All of this is from the leadership that is in place, speaking from a vision and a set of values that the organization is aligned on." (Craig Steinke, Senior Vice President and Group General Manager, BHP Copper Metals)

Applying Conversation Management In Your Organization

Developing certain conversations will make a difference in your organization. Following are conversations that are destructive and unproductive:

Gossip: Gossip is like a disease in organizations. It spreads and builds like a wildfire. No results are being produced by gossip. What is happening is that opportunities are being destroyed. People are being right or feeling superior, but locking in place the agreement that things can't change. Make a commitment to stop gossiping in your organization.
What's Wrong or Who Is to Blame: These conversations end up creating an us versus them situation. Trust is destroyed and communication is constrained. A more powerful conversation to develop is to ask: "What are the facts here?" and after that is discussed to ask: "What actions can be taken to make a difference in what we are committed to have happen?"
Non-productive Complaints: Complaining for complaining's sake makes no difference. People many times complain to make others wrong so they can be right.

Developing the following conversations will be productive and make a difference in your organization:
Productive Complaints: These complaints make a difference because they involve complaining to someone who can make a difference and offering something that addresses the complaint. This is complaining from a perspective of being responsible.
Acknowledgement: Fully acknowledge people for what they do. Acknowledging others creates teamwork, trust and powerful working relationships.
Listening: Learn how to listen from other's perspectives. Listen fully to get what they are communicating from the world they see. Listening in this way will open others up to listening to you and enable you to create productive actions together.

Summary

When there are powerful conversations created at each of the three levels or dimensions, with an alignment between the levels of conversation, the environment for productivity and satisfaction is enhanced. People actually enjoy being at work. The attrition rate drops as this transformed environment takes hold. The companies that are known for their powerful corporate culture are like "magnets" in attracting talented people.

In summary, an organization's competitive advantage rests on the breakthrough development of people capabilities and capacities at all levels. All this is a function of powerfully creating and aligning the three levels of conversation in an organization. This creates an organization that will attract, develop, and retain high performing people.

The University of Southern California Marshall Business School published a case study that focuses on the impact of Vanto Group's (formerly LEBD) work at BHP New Zealand Steel. The case study involving Vanto Group is copyrighted by the author.

To order "Transforming the Network of Conversation in BHP New Zealand Steel: Landmark Education Business Development's New Paradigm for Organizational Change": call 1-800-477-8620.

Case studies are $3.00 each, plus shipping and handling. (CA, GA, NY, and DC residents, add 8.25% sales tax.)

The Talent Foundation, a global, not-for-profit organization headquartered in London, published a research study on the impact of the The Landmark Forum on people in the work environment. The results of the study, conducted within accepted scientific guidelines, were both surprising and exciting; they validate the effectiveness of the Landmark Education technology to enhance people's motivation, commitment, and readiness to learn.

The Talent Foundation provides practical and innovative methods to ensure that the talent within organizations is developed to the benefit of both the individual and the business in the new digital economy. Recognizing that technology skills alone will not create success, the foundation focuses on expanding such human skills as flexibility, creativity, and confidence in the workplace.

Individuals surveyed showed significantly higher levels of motivation, self-esteem, and confidence in relation to their learning and the application of skills at work. [The program] produced radical and sustained change in the way individuals relate to their own development.

By Pamela Dodd

Bob Mueller knows first hand the power of large-scale transformation. Together with San Francisco consultancy Vanto Group (formerly LEBD), a wholly owned and independently managed subsidiary of Landmark Education Corporation, Mueller helped Magma Copper Co. turn transformation into a key organizational competency in the mid-1990s.

Magma had a history of low productivity due to bad union-management relations, including strikes, escalating hostility and distrust, and legal suits. As the vice president transformational technology, Mueller initiated a three-phase strategic process for Magma's culture transformation. In Phase I, 140 executives, managers, and union officials spent a total of 11 days over a five-month period creating a company charter, and establishing accountability charts and overall goals for the next 13 years. The charter and accountabilities expressed the commitment of all Magma stakeholders to teamwork, safety, community well being, financial and environmental responsibility, high performance, innovation, respect, trust, integrity, and a bold future.

Phase II was a three-day Vanto-run leadership program, offered on a voluntary basis to Magma's 5,000 employees. More than 4,000 employees attended, securing themselves inside the future created in Phase I.

Phase III provided a 10-session follow-up seminar for those who had completed the leadership workshop. The seminar, led by 12 Vanto-trained Magma employees, supported individuals and teams in creating projects consistent with their commitment to Magma's overall goals.

The company held quarterly meetings during which people reported their progress and set measures for the next quarter. Teams could declare what they planned to accomplish and they would receive financial rewards for meeting breakthrough measures. In addition, divisions created their own tactical futures. Senior management and the top 50 middle managers also went through an additional one-year small-group transformational program.

Results of this change program were striking. Productivity rose 86?%, production costs dropped 40%, management-union relations improved dramatically, and Magma stock appreciated 700%. During the transformation, Magma spent 3% of annual payroll on training and development...a hefty commitment to every employee.

The problem with most change efforts is that they don't capture the passion, imagination, or deep sense of meaning that people attach to their work. Mueller suggests the following things turned transformation at Magma Copper into a key company competency.

Visionary leadership. Transformation depends on leaders who act as if people are a major differentiating factor and who are willing to put the past behind them and look toward the future. Transformation needs bold moves, not buy-in from below or a cascade from the top.

Wall-to-Wall Authorship. At least 50% of the workforce needs to be meaningfully involved in creating the future in order for transformation to occur. Something happens to learning, commitment, and relatedness when a large number of people pledge themselves to their organization's future and take responsibility for its fulfillment.

Accountability. Many change interventions fall short because the source keeping change in existence isn't created or disappears. Good intentions aren't enough if accountability isn't built into the change process. Magma's transformational shift grew out of spoken and written declarations and commitments that people held.

Integrity. Most organizations are designed to allow for, or tolerate, complaining, cynicism, resignation, and getting by with less than people's best. People who want to make a difference often are stopped by those who don't, and the whole atmosphere becomes one that lacks the integrity of true commitment. Integrity is being true to one's vision and commitments.

When all the people in an organization, from the CEO to the truck driver, share a common vision and commitment, the organization produces extraordinary results.

Mueller carried these messages of transformation to BHP, which acquired Magma Copper in 1996. Since then, Vanto, with Mueller on board, has worked with BHP to produce breakthrough thinking and business results at New Zealand Steel, Goonyella Riverside Coal in Queensland, Australia, Iron Ore Ports and Rail operations in Western Australia, and BHP Corporate in Melbourne, Australia.

A case study of Vanto's work at BHP New Zealand Steel is available. For information on personal transformation as a competency, read The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Ben Zander, Harvard University Press, 2001.

By Steve Zaffron

Reprinted from the September 2001 Issue of Monitor Leasing & Financial Services

Corporate Culture

"Critical to business success [is] the need to align workers with business strategies and to deal with the factors that drive human performance.

Network of Conversations

Three Levels of Conversation

Creating powerful conversations that shape the environment of an organization will leverage the ability of an organization to attract, retain and access the creativity and talent of its people.

Applying Conversation Management In Your Organization

Developing certain conversations will make a difference in your organization. Following are conversations that are destructive and unproductive:

Gossip: Gossip is like a disease in organizations. It spreads and builds like a wildfire. No results are being produced by gossip. What is happening is that opportunities are being destroyed. People are being right or feeling superior, but locking in place the agreement that things can't change. Make a commitment to stop gossiping in your organization.
What's Wrong or Who Is to Blame: These conversations end up creating an us versus them situation. Trust is destroyed and communication is constrained. A more powerful conversation to develop is to ask: "What are the facts here?" and after that is discussed to ask: "What actions can be taken to make a difference in what we are committed to have happen?"
Non-productive Complaints: Complaining for complaining's sake makes no difference. People many times complain to make others wrong so they can be right.

Developing the following conversations will be productive and make a difference in your organization:
Productive Complaints: These complaints make a difference because they involve complaining to someone who can make a difference and offering something that addresses the complaint. This is complaining from a perspective of being responsible.
Acknowledgement: Fully acknowledge people for what they do. Acknowledging others creates teamwork, trust and powerful working relationships.
Listening: Learn how to listen from other's perspectives. Listen fully to get what they are communicating from the world they see. Listening in this way will open others up to listening to you and enable you to create productive actions together.

Summary

Managing Conversations for Performance Breakthroughs

By Gerry Daelemans

Reprinted from ASK, a NASA publication

Reorganizations can have unintended and unexpected outcomes. Sometimes they create new problems in the process of solving old ones. When the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, disbanded its Special Payloads Division in 1998 during a center wide reorganization, the Shuttle Small Payloads Project Office (SSPPO) that had been housed there experienced a simultaneous shift in management, projects, and goals. Finding the right footing and regaining a good working environment in this new terrain took a couple years and an uphill climb.

Since its inception in 1984 and until its retirement in 2003, the SSPPO flew more than seventy-five scientific, technological, and student Hitchhiker experiments; 255 Get Away Special (GAS) payloads; and more than 120 Space Experiment Module (SEM) experiments aboard the Space Shuttle. The SSPPO team was well versed in flying payloads on manned spaceflight missions.

After the reorganization in 1998, GAS and SEM became part of the engineering workforce at Wallops Flight Facility, which reported to SSPPO management at Goddard’s Greenbelt campus. The SSPPO in turn reported to its new management located back at Wallops.

This new office arrangement, a Wallops workforce inexperienced with manned spaceflight payloads, and the merging of two distinct engineering cultures created new complexity within SSPPO. Also around this time, center management began to question why the office was located at Goddard instead of at one of NASA’s manned spaceflight centers. They began pushing for SSPPO to align itself with Goddard’s core business; the office would otherwise be moved to a manned spaceflight center.

Listening and Recognition

I became chief of SSPPO in 2000 and quickly realized we had some challenges to overcome. Our vehicle for payload experiments, the Space Shuttle, was slowly being monopolized by International Space Station (ISS) assembly cargo. Our attempts to obtain ISS payload work were unsuccessful. Center management wanted us to move away from manned spaceflight. Wallops and Greenbelt cultures were clashing. Even though people enjoyed the work we did and were very passionate about continuing it on shuttle and ISS, our future looked bleak given the circumstances.

I found myself asking, how could we gain center support for ISS work? How could we align our work with Goddard’s core business? How could Wallops and Greenbelt work together more productively and cooperatively? How do we boost morale? How do we avoid going out of business?

I began thinking about an extraordinarily effective methodology offered by the Vanto Group. They postulated that people’s actions are correlated to how they perceive the world around them, and that their perception of the world is formed by the conversations they have—those they speak out loud and those unspoken yet communicated, of which they are unaware. So I began to listen anew to what people were saying, to see how this might apply to our situation.

Vanto Group further delved into this notion of foreground and background conversations that I also found myself tuning into. The foreground conversations were easy to hear, as these conversations had been present in our office culture for years: we love what we do, but we aren’t appreciated by management or our colleagues at Greenbelt/Wallops; no one knows the great work we’ve contributed; they just don’t listen; I’m always so busy. There were many positive conversations, too, but the negative ones were of most concern.

The background conversations took more effort to recognize. To understand how background conversations work, think about driving a car now versus when you were sixteen. When you first began driving, the foreground conversations were likely, “Keep this much distance between my car and the one in front of me, signal 100 feet before turning, and do not pass over a double yellow line.” The conversations today might be more like, “How will I get to my destination, who am I meeting, do I need to run chores on my way home?” But the conversations from when you were sixteen haven’t gone away. They’ve been pushed so far into the background you don’t hear them anymore, but they still affect your driving.

The same thing was happening on our team. The “we aren’t appreciated” conversations and some background conversations we could no longer hear were affecting how we perceived the world, which influenced our actions and results. They were also affecting how the world around SSPPO perceived us. We needed to pull those conversations to the forefront so we could recognize them, let them go, and create new ones.

Communication for Commitment and Results

To help the team hear the background conversations, I hired Vanto Group, a consulting firm that designs and implements large-scale initiatives, to elevate organizational performance to conduct a three-day workshop. with an outside expert the Vanto Group who supports organizations in distinguishing the background conversations and creating new, powerful conversations designed for maximum performance.

Forty people from the team participated in the workshop, including civil servants and contractors from both Greenbelt and Wallops. The first thing we focused on was the importance of listening, and listening with the mind, not only the ears. For instance, if I were having a conversation and listened only to decide if I agree or disagree with the speaker, I’m going to miss a lot of what is actually said. Because I am unaware of this agree/ don’t agree filter, I may miss hearing opportunities, requests, or warnings in the conversation. Our team had similar filters; their default listening mode was oriented to hear only evidence that center management didn’t support us or Greenbelt didn’t respect Wallops. We were missing opportunities to take new actions because our background listening was deafening us.

For three days our team worked with Vanto Group on bringing pervasive thoughts and conversations from the background into the foreground. The work we did was analogous to Newton discovering the three laws of physics. He did not invent inertia, acceleration, mass, friction, or resistive forces; he pulled these phenomena from the background to the foreground using math. Similarly, This engagement while of a different order, created a similar breakthrough. It pulled forward the three laws of human performance: our actions are correlated to how we perceive the world; how we perceive the world arises in the language (conversations) we use; and generative language, which is future-action oriented, transforms how the world occurs for us.

It was clear that just changing our actions and expecting a different outcome in performance was not going to elicit the results we wanted; this is a recipe for history to repeat itself. With the team clear of our background and foreground conversations after the workshop, we were free to create new conversations: ones that used generative language and contained possibilities of an exciting future.

Evidence that we succeeded began to emerge almost immediately. Because we had realized we were the authors of our “no support from center management” message, we were able to rewrite it. By making this change, we also altered how others perceived us. The other NASA groups we dealt with started to relate to us differently.

Whereas before we had been denied requests for ISS work, we began receiving inquiries from senior management about how they might support us in getting this work.

For instance, our deputy center director established and attended a meeting with me at NASA Headquarters to present our ideas for ISS efforts and to support our funding request for this new work— a request Headquarters granted.

I also received a call from a senior manager who thought our office would be a great place for a project fully aligned with Goddard’s core business activities. We took over that project, and now not only were we aligned per center management’s earlier requests, we had also found a way to continue our manned spaceflight payload work without moving to a different center.

As our old, disempowering conversations fell from daily use, our productivity also began to rise as we learned to use generative language more frequently. Indeed, one employee who previously had been reluctant to work with the team emerged as a leader, helping improve the relationship between Greenbelt and Wallops. When asked about the change in her behavior, she said that before participating in this initiative, “The air was so thick with negativity and resignation about the future, you could cut it with a knife.” Afterwards, those conversations disappeared, “making the air clean again,” she said.

Network of Conversations

One of the biggest lessons the SSPPO team learned from this initiative was that all we needed to manage was a network of conversations, not the people or the processes. Changing players or plans won’t lead to breakthroughs in performance; indeed, it often leads to a future that looks just like the past. By continually listening to conversations, leaders who understand and apply the three laws of performance can create an environment that brings out the best in people, teams, and organizations. People are much more powerful and passionate than they themselves recognize, and when they understand how they unknowingly inhibit their own performance, they are free to change and fully realize their potential and creativity.

Gerry Daelemans has been with NASA for twenty years and is currently working in the Advanced Concepts and Formulation Office at Goddard Space Flight Center.

The Underpinnings of Breakthrough Performance
By Steve Zaffron, CEO of Vanto Group

Every company in every industry works under certain forces or laws that influence what that company can and can’t do. The ancients who attempted to fly by strapping feathered wings to their arms and flapping with all their might as they leapt from high places invariably failed. Despite their dreams and hard work, they were fighting against powerful forces of nature. Flight became possible only after they came to understand the relevant laws.*1

Just as understanding the relevant laws of gravity, physics, or probability theory make certain things possible—flight, building bridges, financial windfalls—there are laws that apply to the art and science of performance. In our recent book, The Three Laws of Performance, Dave Logan and I identify laws that address the underpinnings of effectiveness, achievement, and breakthrough results, both in business and our day-to-day lives.

This story from Philip Roth seems apropos: “Suppose you and I went up to the ballpark together, and there’s a guy next to us with his kid. And he was saying to his kid, ‘Now, what I want you to do is watch the scoreboard. Stop watching the field. Just watch what happens when the numbers change on the scoreboard. Isn’t that great? Now, do you see what just happened up there? Did you see what happened? Why did that happen?’ And you say, ‘That guy is crazy.’ But the kid imbibes it and he goes home and he’s asked, ‘How was the game?’ And he says, ‘Great! The scoreboard changed thirty-two times and Daddy said last game it changed only fourteen times and the home team last time changed more times than the other team. It was really great! We had hot dogs and we stood up at one point to stretch and we went home.’

“Is that politicizing the game? Is that theorizing the game? No, it’s having not the foggiest idea in the world what [the game] is.”

We have much the same fogginess about what actually causes breakthrough performance, or causes anything for that matter. Most of what we’re familiar with about what causes what we’ve learned from a “cause and effect” model. Causality is a very solid, respected, and useful way of looking at the world. It has produced an enormous amount of valuable information, in terms of what shapes outcomes and behavior. However, if we are aware that causality is just one model for understanding the world and that it is sometimes but not always useful, we are more likely to use it when it works, and not when it doesn’t.

There’s another model that’s also powerful in terms of shaping outcomes and behavior. This model has the additional dimension and advantage of giving us access to the very source of performance. We call this the “correlate” model, and it brings us to the first law of performance we address in the book: Performance is not always caused by or an effect of something, but rather is correlated to—or in a dance with—the way the world shows up for us. To say it again, performance is a result of how the world (or a situation, or a circumstance, or a person) occurs for us.

From time to time in Vanto Group’s consulting engagements, I’ll bring along a tennis ball and ask someone who considers themselves unathletic or uncoordinated to help demonstrate this first law. I say to the person, “I’ll throw the ball; you catch it and return it to me.” I toss the ball and the person attempts to catch it, but they pretty much fumble each time. Then after a few throws I say, “We’re now going to change the game—it’s no longer catching the ball, the new game is to call out which way the ball is spinning as it comes toward you.” For the first two or three throws, the person doesn’t catch the ball when I toss it. He or she calls out which way it’s spinning accurately, but the ball just lands on the floor—and they go after it, pick it up, and lob it back. After a couple of throws, the person begins naturally catching the ball, as well as calling out which way it was spinning—not even aware, really, that the ball is being caught time after time.

In both versions of the game, the person’s performance is correlated to how the world occurs for him or her. In the first part, behavior was correlated with the thinking of being uncoordinated, in the second, to being competent or able. Performance in both situations is related to one thing only—how the world occurs for a particular person.

The second law of performance has to do with the role of language. Oversimplified, the perspectives of “catch this ball, which we already know we can’t catch” and “calling out which way the ball is spinning, which we know we can do quite well” (same ball, same speed) lead to two totally different outcomes. Each perspective is constituted in language—it is in language that we articulate, define, and shape reality. It is the conversation in each game that yields completely different performance outcomes.

We carry such conversations around with us about how things are—how we or our corporations measure up, what’s possible and what isn’t, how things work, what we know to be true. When we say that things are a particular way, we become constrained and limited to what that reality allows—it’s just “the way it is.” To coin a phrase, it becomes an “is world,” and an “is world” has a particular design to it—it’s solid, fixed, and we have to adjust to it. We spend much of our lives struggling with “the way things are,” rather than savoring the malleability that a constitutive view of language can lend to our world. How things occur—occurring—is a linguistically based phenomenon. Language is integral to accessing breakthrough performance. But as posed in the first law, our actions are not correlated to an “is,” fixed, or static world; rather they are correlated to an “occurring” world.

The third law of performance has to do with future-based language. When we know it is our conversations that constitute our world, it shifts our relationship to what’s possible. It puts us in the driver’s seat. The shift doesn’t necessarily get rid of the lens or filters or mindsets per se, but fixed notions, old assumptions, old realities stop defining what’s possible and what’s not. We most commonly use and think of language in an experiential, descriptive, or representational way—as a response to the world, a process of fitting or matching our words to the world as we know it. Let’s call it a word-to-world fit. This use of language allows for certain outcomes, but not others. In a future-based model, language is used in a generative or contextual way, and is more than a response to the world. It yields completely different outcomes and is actually what brings the world into being—a world-to-word fit. In this model, language is both what gives rise to the world and what gives access to what is in that world.

With that premise, we say that reality, conditions, and circumstances of the future do not exist as facts, but rather as a product of our conversations. Assuming that’s the case gives us a certain dominion, a direct and powerful access to shaping performance, to shaping outcomes. This generative, future-based model dynamically and actively pulls for the fulfillment of whatever future we are out to create.

Take Akio Morita, former chairman and cofounder of Sony, who said he would change what “Made in Japan” means. He wasn’t just interested in his company’s performance or a particular product line, but a shift in thought globally as well as in his own country. “Made in Japan” at that time was associated with cheap, poor-quality items. He redefined the phrase to embody leading-edge technology, quality, and the highest levels of customer satisfaction on a worldwide scale. He also created new futures for Sony’s products; he spoke of listening to songs while walking about at a time when nobody believed in the marketability of a tape player that couldn't record—the Walkman was the result. History is strewn with examples. Louis Pasteur set out to demonstrate that microscopic organisms caused disease and propelled medicine into a new era; the writers of the Magna Carta (by establishing the principle of limited government) altered the world stage for human rights; Kennedy’s declaration made manned space exploration a reality.

There’s something very important in these examples—each represents a future not existing at the time. There’s a certain declarative or generative language that was used in each case and the game unfolded in a new direction based on what a person or group of people said. A declaration made by an individual or group isn’t him or her or them speaking “about” something, but is the thing itself—it’s language that actually creates something, brings something forth—the declaring into existence an intention, a stand, something with an impact, a space of possibility.

Possibility is not real at its origin—it’s something we create as real, and then stand for as a reality. And when possibilities such as those mentioned above are created and articulated as a future, the terrain of the present occurs differently for people. Future-based language, in other words, contains the direction and momentum in which and for which things move. It folds the future back into the present, and when that happens people’s actions become correlated to that future and their performance alters in the present. These three laws are about rewriting the future now, and also knowing we have the wherewithal to do that ongoingly.

Visit www.threelawsofperformance.com to find out more about The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan.

*1 Adapted from Introduction, Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2003.