We coach leaders to the Pinnacle of performance
Crossing the Performance-Improvement Chasm:
Topic highlights: ▪ The Next Wave of Competitive Advantage ▪ Why Do We Accept Business Processes We Call "Soft" ▪ Decisive Evidence We Don't Control Critical Success Factors ▪ We Must Reconstruct Some Obsolete Assumptions ○ Five Empowering Assumptions Regarding Performance Excellence ○ The Agony and the Ecstasy of Explicitly Addressing the Mind ▪ Understanding "People Process" from Execution at an Actionable Level ▪ Insights into Aspects of the Auto-Self from a Japanese Perspective ▪ Improving Leadership Development ▪ The Imperative to Adopt the Bipartite Mental Model ○ The Top Five Career Derailers ○ Enhancing, Integrating, and Extending Current Techniques ○ If You Want to Improve Your Organization, Cross the Chasm Yourself ○ The New World of Performance Excellence
Sustainable success requires replacing the uniform-mind
The Next Wave of Competitive Advantage
“The changes in the global economy…have created a situation where all major competitors have equal access to capital, technology, people, and markets. In the face of this equal access, where are the remaining sources of potential advantage?” - Discontinuous Change: Leading Organizational Transformation, DavidA.Nadler et. al.
With the playing field leveled in so many ways, we claim that the best source of competitive advantage lies in maximizing the effectiveness of people in your organization by recognizing the existence of two distinct modes of mental activities, understanding the properties of the automatic mode, and employing systematic techniques built upon an understanding of these properties to improve performance to a higher level than your competition's. Those organizations that cross the chasm to the bipartite-mind theory of performance excellence and performance improvement will enjoy a sustainable competitive advantage over their competitors that languish on the myopic side of the performance-improvement divide.
Why Do We Accept Business Processes We Call "Soft"?
Because auto-context reconstructions (revealing and changing previously unchallenged hidden assumptions) inherently create discomfort, most business leaders have remained comfortably complacent way too long with a performance-improvement structure that does not meet their success needs. Leaders can no longer afford the luxury of maintaining the (often implicit) assumption that humans fundamentally operate in a single mode. Current performance-improvement practices have now accumulated far too many "anomalies" that we loosely bundle together under the vague banner of poorly understood and inadequately managed "soft" success factors. Would you use "soft" product development techniques to design an airplane? Would you use "soft" manufacturing processes to build a personal computer? Would you use "soft" quality-control procedures to ensure the integrity of a heart-lung machine? Most leaders consider it best to avoid using "soft" accounting practices to keep track of the financial health of their business. To maximize your ability to succeed, you employ methodical processes with solid theoretical foundations in all these areas. Why would you tolerate trying to maximize the performance of your most important assets, your other leaders and valued employees, using nebulous concepts and concomitant processes that lack a solid theoretical foundation? We now understand that we label so many success factors "soft" because leaders in the business community have so far failed to recognize and accept the reality of a second part of the mind that they must critically understand and systematically manage.
Decisive Evidence We Don't Control Critical Success Factors
When innovators first gain insight into something new, the best initial way to identify the emergent concept to others is by relating it to something mutually understood. Hence, the metaphor "soft" emerged to identify a class of elusive success factors because “soft” connotes mushy, elusive, identifiable but not yet describable, and difficult to measure. This metaphor gained further strength by comparison to something more familiar, which was then referred to as “hard” success factors connoting solid, understandable, easy to describe, and normally measurable. As investigators dug deeper into this new concept, additional insights emerged and once again they used metaphors to identify them, including thinking “outside the box,” “gut” feelings, “intuitive” insights, “comfort zone”, “tacit” knowledge, the “people process,” “internalize” an activity, “low road” (Goleman - Social Intelligence), and to a significant extent even “leadership.” These and many other insights into elusive aspects of performance excellence in the workplace have been helpful, and clever people have developed techniques to improve these “soft” success factors, including experiential workshops, transformational coaching, and action learning activities.
Just as most penetrations into new ways of seeing things start with metaphors, so also does an increasing need for improvement eventually hit a point of diminishing returns due to indirectlyidentifying so we know something new exists rather than directlydescribing the new concepts so we can understand them in order to manage them more effectively. We have remained stuck at the metaphoric stage for some time with respect to performance improvement. To move beyond metaphoric identifications, we must create some new terminology with precise definitions of the concepts involved and use the new vocabulary to create a sufficiently robust understanding to weave a theory that overcomes the previous anomalies (shortcomings). We no longer need to discuss the elusive concept of "soft" success factors. We can now describe these more powerfully as "auto-self" success factors. In the following table, the left column presents helpful but increasingly inadequate metaphorical identifications of “soft” success factors as viewed from the implicit uniform-mind model of human performance. The right column presents the corresponding robust descriptions of the same concepts in the form of "auto-self" success factors as viewed from the explicit bipartite-mind theory of human performance. Eventually, the soft concept of "soft" success factors should atrophy in favor of the hard concept of "auto-self" success factors.
It doesn't matter how smart or knowledgeable you are, you cannot "think" your way through managing the “soft” success factors in the left column of the above list. ThomasKuhn taught us long ago to recognize the accumulation of anomalies as the sign we need a paradigm shift. We can add that another indicator that we have reached the point where we must search for a more effective way to understand an important topic is the accumulation of metaphors that identify issues that we need to describe so we can understand and manage them more effectively. We must face the fact that we label so many success factors with the general metaphor "soft,” and use additional metaphors for specific aspects of automatic activities, because they are anomalies within the current uniform-mind performance-improvement auto-context (paradigm, Pinnacle, or theoretical structure) that we use to understand and improve performance. Hear the clarion call to adapt to the new bipartite-mind approach to view and manage performance excellence.
We Must Reconstruct Some Obsolete Assumptions
As we have asserted, auto-contexts enable and constrain the access we have to key concepts. Most leaders lack one or more of the following five empowering assumptions (either explicit contexts or implicit auto-contexts) to frame their approach to performance excellence.
Five Empowering Assumptions Regarding Performance Excellence:
1. Soft Success Factors Play a Crucial Role in Success 2. We Must Address the Mind - It Is Bipartite 3. Understanding Something about the Auto-Self Empowers Us 4. Feelings Play a Key Role in Workplace Performance 5. Auto-Self Improvement Differs Fundamentally from Thinking-Self Improvement
Here is an empowering challenge for you. What do you assume about these five issues? Whether you realize it or not, you do have underlying assumptions about these topics. If you don't have explicit assumptions, try to "dig out" the implicit assumptions buried in your auto-contexts that you use to understand human performance excellence and performance improvement.
1: Soft Success Factors Play a Crucial Role in Success: I have met executives who claim soft success factors aren't important. Look at the list in the table above. Most leaders will realize that these topics are crucial to success and do their best to handle them. Successful people who believe otherwise still somehow address these issues, but they could manage auto-self success factors much better if they understood them explicitly and used systematic processes built upon the bipartite-mind theory.
2: We Must Address the Mind - It Is Bipartite: Evidence from business practice and the performance-improvement literature demonstrate that an overwhelming majority of leaders believe there is no need to understand the mind in business. Unfortunately, that belief blocks access to a new foundation to create a more robust set of systematic processes to manage the “soft” success factors. Even if you don't explicitly think about the mind and even if you think it's not appropriate to discuss the mind in a work environment, you still have an implicit assumption about how the mind works. Try to uncover your implicit assumption about the mind. If you assume it is uniform and controlled mainly by thoughts and explicit knowledge, then your challenge is to explain how to understand and manage the soft success factors in the above table using that assumption explicitly. Good luck!
3: Understanding Something About the Auto-Self Empowers Us: Leaders who are not experts in performance improvement still benefit significantly from understanding the four types of auto-self (auto-behaviors, auto-contexts, auto-skills, and auto-expertise) and at least having familiarity with some key properties of the auto-self (involuntary, operates outside of awareness, repeated activities migrate to the auto-self, induces feelings). Leaders would also do well to understand the unfair fight, competing priorities, and the principle of counteracting auto-self drives. It also helps to understand when auto-self factors interfere with success to the point where further improvements may require securing expert transformation resources.
4: Feelings Play a Key Role in Workplace Performance: After having read the section on dual priorities, and looking over the summary of feelings-related success factors in the above table, I hope you don't still harbor the antiquated assumption that feelings don't affect personal performance. If you maintain that assumption, you will never achieve the level of leadership excellence that you could otherwise enjoy.
5: Auto-Self Improvement Differs Fundamentally from Thinking-Self Improvement: Manyotherwise effective leaders continue to make the mistake of trying to use directives or explanations to get people to execute more effectively when auto-self actions control the activity. One of the significant advantages of the bipartite-mind theory comes from explicitly recognizing the auto-self, understanding its properties, and building reliable techniques upon the solid foundation of the bipartite-mind theory. We cannot improve the thinking-self by imparting new knowledge.
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Explicitly Addressing the Mind:
Even though Gloria was not able to understand automatic activities very well, she decided to embark on a set of potential improvements on the "soft" side of human performance. She described her first intervention approach as follows: “In an effort to improve the performance of some of our leaders, we hired coaches but they achieved vastly varying degrees of success. The coaches who seemed most able to help people change behaviors were reformed psychotherapists who had learned enough business vocabulary to interact reasonably well while trying to improve our leaders. Other coaches provided some helpful advice, but they seemed clueless about how to change some of the soft issues; these people appeared to perform like what we used to call “consultants” who have now hung out a different shingle. As we assessed progress after a few engagements, we abandoned coaching as too haphazard and not providing enough payback for our investment, producing sufficient improvement to meet our needs, or creating changes that consistently endure.”
Gloria was persistent, so she continued to experiment with performance-improvement techniques, as she relates: “I sent people to leadership-development classes. They generally come back enthusiastic that they learned a lot and that the experience-based interactions helped them change. However, I also noticed that a few weeks after they return, most of them reverted back to many of their old behaviors and abilities.” Gloria saw some progress, but she knew she needed more, so she tried yet another approach. “We retained one organization that wanted to help us try the consumer-oriented Emotional Intelligence approach in the workplace. That program helped our organization realize that feelings do play a significant role in the workplace, but it was not the comprehensive program I was looking for because it could not handle many aspects of performance excellence, including developing leadership skills and understanding how embedded paradigms affect our business strategy.”
Gloria finally encountered a colleague who knew about the bipartite-mind theory. To say the least, she did not jump at this opening, as she explains: "When an acquaintance told me I needed to come to grips with the second component of the human mind, I thought I had met a New Age wacko trying to take me off to mystical la-la land that might entertain but has no relevancy to business success. Service providers come in here all the time trying to sell me performance-improvement processes. When any of them start discussing the mind, I usually run for cover. There seems to be an endless array of mystical theories that promise magical solutions. One particularly enthusiastic lady tried to speak to me about the Reiki system and how it would really help us all perform better. After she left, I googled ‘Reiki’ and got over 12 million hits. I was impressed; this must be a popular system. Then I looked further into it and discovered that it postulated actual mental energy waves floating around in space. I have no patience with that mystical stuff. I remember from my undergraduate psychology classes that two common denominators that seemed to make all of the psychotherapeutic approaches work somewhat was that they provided support and hope. So, I assume people using mystical coaching practices might enable some improvements through providing support and by creating hope if these ‘coaches’ could somehow convince down-to-earth executives that these mystical processes could really help them. Even though these ‘coaches’ might achieve some benefit through this placebo effect, there is no way this minimalist approach would give us a sustainable competitive advantage, and we would fall into a competitive disadvantage against our competitors who locate and use truly effective techniques. I need solid concepts and reliable improvement techniques to help us outperform our competitors.”
With that inauspicious setup, we attempted to persuade Gloria
many other attempts to deal with the mind. Once I got over the shock and made an effort to consider why understanding the dual nature of the mind might help us succeed, it started to make sense. It provides clear definitions of every aspect of soft success factors that I am aware of. The bipartite-mind model is solid and understandable. It does not entail digging deeply into psychological intricacies of the mind or philosophizing about the mind. It also avoids the burden of diving into the complexities of the neurophysiology of the brain, as the emotional-intelligence people used to support their theory. The bipartite-mind theory uses new leader-friendly terminology, which I welcomed because I needed a new way to understand what I knew as ‘soft success factors.’ What I discovered was that I needed to learn a minimal amount about the mind that would enable me to lead my organization more effectively and guide others to improve their performance systematically. As I overcame my initial uneasiness and accepted the dual nature of our mind, activities that used to bewilder me suddenly became clear. The new distinction of the auto-self enabled me to notice people working uncontrollably that I would have missed before. It also enabled me to guide others to apply processes appropriate to various aspects of the auto-self and to seek external help when our efforts failed."
Gloria agonized over her initial resistance to discovering how understanding the dual nature of the mind and a little about how the automatic part of our mind controls so much of our success. Such resistance is normal; it occurs when we try to understand a concept that is outside a current auto-context about any topic, including human performance. However, her rather long resistance upset Gloria, as she recounted: "I have long prided myself on being innovative and open to new ideas. Yet, somehow I resisted learning about the bipartite mind. When I finally dove in and understood it, I discovered answers to most of my questions and that opened up powerful new possibilities. I’m ecstatic that I discovered and eventually embraced the bipartite-mind theory. Not only does it solve many previously elusive issues for me at work, but I now I understand some of my children’s weird behaviors better and maybe know a bit more about how to guide them.” What Gloria experienced was the chasm between understanding, or even seriously considering, concepts outside of current auto-contexts, and the reality of actually experiencing the process. For auto-self activities, knowing does not help much in doing. Fortunately, we were able to counteract her inherent resistance by inducing virtual consequences to counteract her automatic resistance to understand something outside of a current auto-context, and that put her in a new position to help her company
Consistent with Gloria’s drive to improve performance, she took actions when she finally embraced the bipartite model of human performance, as she relates: “We had many leaders sit through the presentation and some interactions on the auto-self theory and techniques. This was a helpful exercise because now the key leaders in the organization have a higher awareness of those things we do automatically and have some better ways of discussing them. We also put two people through a coaching program, with excellent results that are still in effect more than a year after they completed their program.
Gloria also expressed her desire to learn to coach, but she understood the potential downside of internal coaching due to potential conflicts in confidential disclosure, as she explained: “I want to learn to coach because I think I could do a good job and because it would lower the overall investment my company will need make on auto-self improvements. However, I realize that during coaching I disclosed information about my personal life that I would never discuss with a colleague for fear it may get out at work. I understand from my coach that only about 1/3 of the people in coaching discuss significant aspects of their personal life, so I could potentially coach two-thirds of the leaders who need help. The problem is how do we know which people might discuss personal issues ahead of time to determine if an internal coach can work effectively?” Gloria had an appropriate insight into the confidentiality issue regarding internal coaches. While potentially crucial to the coaching process (as with the Roger and Morry coaching engagements), the specter of confidentiality issues should not automatically exclude internal coaching. Sometimes the survey feedback may indicate a behavior that has high potential to impact family members. Also, one could ask coachees if they would like to discuss behaviors outside of work and if so would they prefer an external coach. Finally, while not desirable, an internal coach could recommend changing to an external coach if, during the coaching process, the coachee indicates a desire to include personal “events” with regard to enacting intentions but does not want to disclose them to a colleague.
Gloria's new awareness of the dual nature of the human mind is typical of people who reconstruct their underlying assumptions about human performance. I recently heard a CEO client explain to one of his employees, "I realize you probably did not intend to do it, but your auto-self causes it and you just don't notice. I'm telling you that your colleagues and I have observed the behavior I described. Now let's discuss how you can overcome that counterproductive habit." In the past, rather than using this patient, insightful, and productive approach, this CEO would have torn into the employee for deliberately doing something wrong and for denying it.
Understanding "People Process" from Execution at Actionable Level
Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, in their book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, address many aspects of the auto-self when they identify the existence and importance of what they call the "people process." I think this excellent book would be even more powerful if they discussed the people process in terms of the bipartite-mind model outlined at this website. The table below lists some of the examples they give for the people process along with deeper understanding provided by the bipartite-mind theory. Understanding the properties of the auto-self also enables us to create and use systematic processes for improving the people process.
Bossidy and Charan make some powerful statements about the importance of the people process.
“The [auto-self based] people process is more important than either the [thinking-self based] strategy or operations processes.”
“If you don’t get the people process right, you will never fulfill the potential of your business.”
Insights into Aspects of the Auto-Self from a Japanese Perspective
Ikujiro Nonaka & Hirotaka Takeuchi, in their book, The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, focus on what they call "tacit" knowledge.
"Japanese companies…recognize that the knowledge expressed in words and numbers represents only the tip of the iceberg. They view knowledge as being primarily “tacit” – something not easily visible and expressible."
The authors provide a useful distinction between explicit and "tacit" (or what psychologists call "implicit") knowledge. I think their insights become clearer and more powerful if we further distinguish fundamentally different types of “tacit knowledge” by recognizing that the authors include auto-contexts, some auto-skills, and auto-expertise under what they identify as "tacit knowledge."
Tacit knowledge as auto-contexts: "Tacit knowledge contains an important cognitive dimension. It consists of schemata, mental models, beliefs, and perceptions so ingrained that we take them for granted."
Tacit knowledge as auto-skills: "One day, however, she [a woman trying to build an automatic bread making machine] noticed that the baker was not only stretching but also “twisting” the dough, which turned out to be the secret for making tasty bread. Thus she socialized the head baker’s tacit knowledge through observation, imitation, and practice."
Tacit knowledge as auto-expertise: "Tacit knowledge is highly personal and hard to formalize, making it difficult to communicate or to share with others. Subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches fall into this category of knowledge."
The authors provide excellent discussions about auto-contexts and some auto-skills as in the example above. However, they don't distinguish these forms explicitly or discuss the characteristics of auto-expertise. Unlike auto-contexts, which are hidden assumptions and beliefs that we can make explicit through probing and reflection; and auto-skills, which are automatic actions that we can discover through observation; auto-expertise relies on complex pattern and relationship matching that defies procedural understanding. Returning to our chess example, chess experts cannot explain how their auto-self performs pattern matching. Proof of this comes from the extreme difficulty encountered in programming computers to compete with chess grandmasters who use their rapid, highly-parallel auto-expertise but cannot explain the rules they use because this part of their mind does not work in the sequential mode that we are used to with our slow thinking-self and that computers execute rapidly. When we distinguish different auto-self forms of tacit knowledge, we create new clarity for understanding opportunities to manage non-explicit knowledge that can improve our chances to succeed.
Improving Leadership Development
Even the best leadership development organizations today don't do as well as they could because we have lacked the common assumption of a bipartite mind and a theory that describes the inner workings of the automatic side of human performance. Here is what Jay Conger, in his book, Learning to Lead: The Art of Transforming Managers into Leaders, says about leadership development:
“I am convinced that the personal growth approaches could be significantly more powerful than they are, but many of their designers do not fully appreciate the mechanics of their own techniques.”
"The personal growth dimensions of a program are, I believe, among the greatest levers that formal training can apply in developing leadership ability, which is why we need to spend more time understanding them. Potentially, they address the inner side of an individual [the auto-self], which is where leadership may ultimately spring from or where it is blocked."
We should interpret Conger’s observations as yet another clarion call to cross the chasm to a theory-based approach to leadership development.
The bipartite model of the mind enables us to understand that the underlying reason we distinguish management from leadership is because the thinking-self drives most management practices and the auto-self controls most leadership abilities. If we want to raise leadership development to the level of management development, we must explicitly recognize, understand, and conquer the auto-self. Most successful leaders today use a combination of natural interpersonal skills and a tenacious, forceful personality to inspire and drive people toward desired goals. In addition to teaching leadership skills, leadership development in the future will need to be much more adept at constructing abilities to reveal hidden auto-contexts, test them against business needs, and reconstruct them when they no longer match success needs. Performance developers will also need to construct in leaders the ability to guide others to transform their auto-behaviors and to have the courage to learn about their own auto-characteristics and the wisdom to seek help if the feedback identifies serious shortcomings. In general terms, instead of endless arguments about the true nature of "leadership," we can focus on the auto-behaviors, auto-skills, auto-contexts, and auto-expertise managers need to have, in addition to sufficient thinking-self knowledge and IQ points, to run organizations successfully.
The Imperative to Adopt the Bipartite Mental Model
The evidence is overwhelming that the uniform-mind assumption for performance improvement has outlived its usefulness. The consequences are too severe to remain trapped in an anachronistic performance-improvement culture. To remain successful, leaders must brace themselves to cross the chasm now to a new contextual Pinnacle for performance improvement. If you accept that assertion, you have two viable alternatives: adopt the bipartite-mind theory proposed here or find (or construct!) a better alternative. I assert unequivocally that the implicit uniform-mind model has become irretrievably archaic. Any new theory you choose must explicitly recognize, model, and manage the automatic mode of human activities. There are no empowering reasons, only disempowering excuses, for not abandoning the current uniform-mind model and crossing the chasm to a bipartite-mind theory of human performance that explicitly recognizes and effectively handles automatic human activities.
In the past, when paradigm-breaking achievements in product development, manufacturing, distribution, or quality management emerged, those who crossed the chasm early saw their careers flourish, and they played key roles in helping their companies succeed. Those who remained trapped in the old culture saw their careers stagnate at best, and they didn't lead their companies toward greater success. You face such a turning point now for adopting a new paradigm with respect to execution and performance improvement.
The Top Five Career Derailers:
Auto-self deficiencies cause four of the top five derailers according to the results from a study reported by Jean Brittain Leslie & Ellen Van Velsor in their Center for Creative Leadership booklet, A Look at Derailment Today: North America and Europe.
Here are the top five derailers:
Four of the career derailers are clearly auto-self deficiencies. Either the thinking-self or the auto-self could cause the remaining derailer, poor performance, with both likely contributing. Because the auto-self causes most career derailments, and because properties of the auto-self include taking place outside of awareness and occurring independent of intentions, we now easily recognize why previously successful people are blindsided by their career setbacks, and we know how to prevent it.
Enhancing, Integrating, and Extending Current Techniques:
A wonderful aspect of crossing the chasm to the bipartite-mind theory of performance improvement is that all of the current techniques that develop the thinking-self remain just as effective as before we made the leap. The bipartite model of performance does not replace how we understand and manage the thinking-self; it retains what we have and adds explicit recognition, fundamental understanding, and systematic techniques for improving the auto-self. And, current techniques that work for managing some aspects of the auto-self remain available, only now they have a solid theoretical foundation, so we can extend them and make them more systematic. Additionally, new techniques will emerge built upon the foundation of the new bipartite-mind theoretical structure, some of which we outlined on earlier web pages.
In addition to complementing other performance-improvement efforts as indicated above, the overarching bipartite-mind theory provides a common underpinning for many seemingly distinct concepts such as execution, undesired behaviors, blockages to action, non-explicit (tacit) knowledge, leadership development, culture change, interpersonal skills, performance improvement, coaching, self-help, and blindsided career derailment.
If You Want to Improve Your Organization, Cross the Chasm Yourself:
"It is now widely recognized that to remain competitive in today’s global environment, organizations must frequently make deep change. What is not so widely recognized is that organizational members must also make deep change. Deep personal change is being demanded with more frequency today than in the past."
"Organizational change always begins with a personal change." - Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within, Robert E.Quinn
Culture change occurs when a critical mass of individuals reconstruct a personal auto-context that they share with others in the organization. Most organizations have an anemic cultural framework (shared auto-context) with respect to performance improvement. Overcoming this starts with making everyone’s assumptions about the mind explicit. This will enable productive discussions about the robustness of current improvement techniques. The uniform model of the mind (or even worse acting phobic about understanding or examining the mind) is the deep-seated barrier to catching the new wave of performance improvement leading to competitive advantage. Organizational change starts with personal change. Make your assumptions explicit about how the mind processes the so-called "soft" success factors. When you recognize the bipartite nature of the mind, that will open up a new universe of opportunities for you in your ability to manage the auto-self success factors.
Operational leaders in businesses and other types of organizations have the direct responsibility for maximizing the performance of people in their organization, but most operating executives are too busy in the hand-to-hand combat aspects of running their business to spend the time or devote the energy to take the lead in understanding what it takes to cross the chasm to a new performance improvement culture. It will normally fall to performance specialists, both inside and outside of operating companies, to cross the performance-improvement chasm themselves first and then guide the operating executives to adapt. This is what Rachel did with Sam when they couldn't get the performance they needed out of key leaders in their organization (as we mentioned in the Pinnacle section). Performance specialists focused on a broad spectrum of improvements including leadership developers, culture changers, organization development specialists, trainers, transformational coaches, business book authors and consultants, HR generalists, executive recruiters, performance improvement organizations, and university business schools must face the inadequacy of the current underlying assumption of a uniform mind and adopt the bipartite mind as the base assumption to maximize performance. Performance specialists can then use a bipartite-mind theory of performance improvement to help the leaders they serve create an "unfair" advantage against their competitors who miss this next wave of performance improvement.
The New World of Performance Excellence:
Heed the clarion call to cross the performance-improvement chasm. Expectations and processes for achieving peak performance have now reached the inevitable turning point of transforming from metaphoric identification of many automatically-enacted aspects of human performance (the so-called "soft" success factors) to explicit recognition of the bipartite mind and solid understanding of how the auto-self works, upon which a proliferation of reliable improvement processes will be built. The concepts and techniques outlined at this website outline a transformation path to a new shared auto-context regarding achieving peak performance and sustaining success.
"Organizations need to develop a work force that can change several times, not just once." - Sustaining Change: Creating the Resilient Organization, by Mitchell Lee Marks and Robert E. Shaw in Discontinuous Change, David A. Nadler et. al. editors.
The bipartite model of the mind makes clear that we not only need to learn continuously, we also must recontextualize periodically. The chasm you need to cross right now to a new performance improvement Pinnacle is an example of the recontextualizing process, which you will need to do periodically for your business model, attitudes, self-image, and shared behavior expectations. Besides improving through these auto-context reconstructions, the auto-self improves through periodic auto-behavior transformations, auto-skill practice, and auto-expertise development. The gold standard for performance excellence in the future will be to become a transformable leader, and the concomitant paragon for business success will be to become a transformable organization. We have now reached the critical turning point in organizational development where creating auto-self transformability will provide the most potent source of sustainable competitive advantage. Welcome to the expanded world of execution excellence!
Change starts with you. Here are some performance do's and don'ts you can start practicing now.
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