Wanting ourselves and others to perform optimally is a common goal, but achieving the goal remains a rarity. Below, Simon introduces a 16-word Optimal Performance framework he has developed through his work educating knowledge workers for Nakedize and Wellington-Uni Professional.

Improvement is in our DNA

Trying to do better—to fulfil our potential by solving problems or realising opportunities—is part of being human.

In our private lives, improvement efforts tend to be short-lived. Tedious repetition and a lack of encouragement allows improvement thinking to become autopilot, action to become habit.

At work, however, most of us are expected to be ‘continuously’ on the lookout for improvement opportunities. For knowledge workers, designing and implementing improvement is often our primary role. And, because all workers perform variably (unlike well-functioning machinery), every manager—including leaders, teachers, and advisers—should be seeking to design and implement the conditions for optimal performance.

Optimal performance is far from our norm

Despite the ever-present need for creating the conditions for optimal performance, and despite the fortunes being spent on the salaries of knowledge workers responsible for making things optimal, workplaces that hum along in top gear are incredibly rare.

Sadly, what isn’t rare are stressed office workers who feel they are actually being blocked from fulfilling their individual and collective potentials. We need to acknowledge that systems either provision or prevent optimal performance, and we need to transform (redesign, not tweak) most of our systems so they stop hindering the people they are supposed to support and ‘unleash’.

[A manager] needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in.—Edwards Deming

Optimal performance is neither ‘continuous improvement’ nor ‘best practice’

Optimal performance is highly qualified and contextual, which distinguishes its pursuit from much of the costly busyness going on in offices all around the world. Optimality depends on context (time, place, and situation), so it is unlikely to be achieved by the (often stale) autopilot behaviours licensed by best practice methodologies.

Optimal performance is doing activities you have first deemed contextually worthwhile, so it cannot be the same thing as ‘continuous improvement’. Continual (or regular) improvement is almost certainly part of optimal performance, but continuous doesn’t mean regular, it means incessant. (Note, kaizen means ‘good change’, not continuous change). The blind pursuit of continuous improvement can often result in a restless, costly muddle.

If you are doing the best you can within a context—that is, you are achieving your goal without overspending resources and without burning out any part of your system—then enjoy it: make hay and give yourself a pat on the back. Of course, don’t close your eyes to improvement opportunities but, equally, don’t serially degrade your performance by always being in that dissatisfied mode of assuming meaningful improvement is just around the corner, if only you would work a bit harder to find it. It is not helpful to always be in change mode: we need good reasons (which I will write about in a future article) to usefully invoke change.

It’s time to optimise our responses to sub-optimal performances

Fertilised with modern wealth and technology, improvement activity has proliferated over the last 20 years. But it is not all good activity. It is not all good change. Much of it is not business—working gainfully on matters that truly concern us—it is busyness.

You would think not performing optimally would get to us. And you would think that after baking a dozen sunken cakes we might think to find a recipe, or check the recipe we are using to ensure we have not forgotten a crucial ingredient (or two).

Well, poor performance—solvable problems not solved, realisable opportunities not realised—has got to me. It got to me a very long time ago, which is why I established Nakedize in 2004. And now I have finally whittled the recipe down to the 15 words in the framework below.

Like my 2005 Theory of Universal Human Needs, I am proposing this as a universal framework. You can apply it to any endeavour, anywhere, any time. You can use it as the simplest, most efficient of checklists to ensure your improvement efforts have a shot of success.

If the concepts sound familiar, that is good, they should: they are universal. This framework ties together performance truths highlighted by Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle and change truths highlighted by Chip and Dan Heath’s Switch framework.

I encourage you to use this framework.

Finally, if the framework helps you to unravel a wicked problem or two, I would love to hear about it.

Nakedize’s Optimal Performance Framework (v2.5)

Optimal performance requires the alignment of desire, ability, and opportunity towards an optimal goal: a goal whose value is recognised and embraced by all involved.

Culture ultimately dictates behaviour but, through good leadership, an inspiring goal can pull culture into alignment, demand appropriate skills and systems, and licence appropriate behavioural and structural changes.

Characteristics

Effectiveness: Products and services are effective if they do their job.
Efficiency: Products and services are cost-effective if their benefits outweigh their costs.
Sustainability: Resources (materials, people, skills, processes, tools) are sustainable if they are secure, long-term.

Ingredient sets

Ingredient sets for the Nakedize Optimal Performance Framework

Document history

7 Feb 2016: article updated
6 Dec 2015: framework updated to version 2.5
25 Sept 2015: original article

First was their gender — I just never imagined we would have two girls. Next was the disconcerting reality of their size — one was just 1930g (4lbs 4ozs). But the king-hit (a surprise that has lost none of its awesome power in its thousand re-occurrences since that unforgettable day three years ago) was protective love: the kind you would instantly lay down your life for. It sounds melodramatic but, of course, it’s a simple truth of parenthood. A simple truth I had massively underestimated, like so many things.

And that brings me to the fatherhood surprise that (as I suspect is true for most new fathers) probably ranks as my #2, both in terms of poignancy and frequency: the relegation of romance from the front seat of my two-person marriage to the rear of my new four-person family, if there is any room after the buggy, high chairs, nappy bag, food bag, clothes bag, toy bag …

Now, if you’re thinking, yeah, yeah, he doesn’t mean romance, he means sex, and if he was a mother it wouldn’t be high on his list of priorities either, then, please, take a breath and pause before you read on.

I do mean romance, which (if anyone has forgotten) certainly involves sex, but it also involves attention, intimacy, a predisposition to interpret your partner’s characteristics and actions in a favourable light, and dependence.

Dependence is something mothers know all about: it’s what my wife received a double helping of the day our children were born, and it’s what powered her, more than anything else, to become the super-human, 24-7 worker she was month after month. And it’s still powering her today.

Being the #1 person in the life of someone you love is astonishingly powerful stuff, and the moment my daughters were born I felt like I was one half of that amazing dynamic three times over. But the truth is the moment they were born I ceased being that person to anyone. Just another simple truth of parenthood, but one I have no problem admitting I didn’t foresee, and it has broad-sided me more than a few times.

To my mind, the consequences of this sudden imbalance in the relationships of new parents are underestimated, far-reaching, and well worth plenty of open and honest discussion; but for now let me just throw two logs on the fire.

First, mothers, a thought about the actions of your husband or partner. Needing you, and needing you to show him that you need him, does not necessarily make him selfish, weak, or out of touch with either your needs or the needs of your children. It just makes him human.

And second, fathers, a thought about the actions of your wife or partner. The responsibility of keeping everyone clean and fed and where they need to be is simply overwhelming, or at least it would be if she wasn’t super-organized and supercharged on all that ‘dependence-power’—power that she needs. If you think your job is more exhausting than hers then try hers, without assistance, for just forty-eight hours and see if you still feel the same way.

I have learned that my wife puts being organized before being romantic to avoid drowning in washing and dishes and nappies and toys and kids; not to douse passion. And the only way that I can create the romance we both need is to assist her to be organized and to feel organized. It may not sound like a recipe for romance, but it works.