Back in October I read and blogged about Tribal Leadership by Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright. The thesis presented in Tribal Leadership is that the health of organizations correlates with growth in the average number of connections between members of the organization over time. If you haven't read Tribal Leadership, then you should check it out. That book, unlike this one, also includes a useful cheatsheet, which summarizes the most important points of the book. It's the better place to start, and should probably be read in conjunction with The Three Laws of Performance.
Both of these books promote what Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi would call a systems model for explaining individual and group performance. According to the systems model, there is no particular habit or activity that will guarantee an individual who practices it better performance or more creativity. The reason for this is that whereas an individual produces the performance or creative work, the work must then be evaluated and accepted by the field of experts for the symbolic domain of the performance before it can become a part of that domain. In other words, transcendent performances (including creative works and the accomplishment of challenging business goals) require collaboration between individuals and groups. Growth (or decay) results as groups and the individuals who constitute them evolve to tackle successively more complex goals.
The Three Laws of Performance provides a list of rules (and stories explaining how they work in practice) that promise to help individuals in leadership roles facilitate the group coherence and cohesion that are necessary to bring about transcendent performance. The book is based on a wealth of experience from decades of applying the ideas it explains. If you're interested in this kind of theory, the book is worth a read. It was disappointing, however, that the authors didn't make more of an effort to connect their ideas up with similar work done by others in the past. I'll explain with reference to the three laws themselves.
The first law of performance holds that how people perform correlates to how situations "occur" to them. This odd choice of word raises many questions. Fortunately, the authors were merciful enough to address the confusion upfront:
So what exactly does occur mean? We mean something beyond perception and subjective experience. We mean the reality that arises within and from your perspective on the situation. In fact, your perspective is itself part of the way in which the world occurs to you. "How a situation occurs" includes your view of the past (why things are the way they are) and the future (where all this is going)."
Now without a systems model in mind, this is nearly incomprehensible to me. Again, the best way that I have of understanding it is in terms of a systems model that includes feedback loops between individuals, the field that includes those individuals, and the domain of symbolic knowledge that the field operates within. If you want a picture, consider this diagram from Roger Penrose's Road to Reality:
In this diagram we see the feedback loop that connects the physical world, our mental picture of it (our consciousness), and our models of it in a given symbolic domain (such as language or mathematics). We can associate each stage of the loop with different people who work within a particular symbolic domain. For a domain to be cohesive, each individual within the group has to a have a mental picture of the entire domain. For it to be coherent, those pictures have to be consistent with the rules of the domain set by a group of recognized experts. So the bottom left corner would correspond to individuals within the group. The top corner corresponds to the domain as it is defined by the group of people who are considered experts in the domain. Note that although the rules of the domain are determined by the group of experts, the domain exists independent of any one of the experts -- making it possible for individuals in the bottom left corner to contribute, and for the domain to outlive any particular expert.
Finally, in the bottom right corner we have the physical world in which everything is embedded. It is through this corner that new information (including experimental observations or discoveries) enters the loop.
Having a systems model in mind makes the first law more comprehensible, at least to me. With the systems model in mind, we can reinterpret the first law as "how individuals perform correlates to their memory and forecast for how the group and the world itself have and will evolve over time." (Or something pretty close to that.) So far this might seem fascinating, but also useless. So what? Should seeing things this way make any difference in how we act?
The answer is yes because as Werner Erhard knew well, it is possible to change the loop by convincing individuals to change how they understand their past and forecast their future, especially as it relates to others within the group. As the Author's Note makes clear, part of the intellectual history of this book is derived from the knowledge and experience of people who worked with Erhard in the est seminars popular several decades ago. Incidentally, that inheritance might also explain the willingness to leave some terminology inscrutable. Part of the ethics of est seems to have involved challenging the audience to engage with the teaching intellectually -- a practice best exemplified by Socrates and worst exemplified by Heidegger, both of whom might also be considered antecedents to this sort of philosophy.
Back to the book. The remaining two laws basically spell out a prescription for how to implement transformational change within an organization given that the systems model applies. So the second law holds that "how a situation occurs arises in language." This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is now an accepted fact at least among cognitive psychologists. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explains how corners of the loop are linked.
The third law holds that "[f]uture based language transforms how situations occur to people." In other words, when enough individuals working within a domain decide to change the domain, then the domain and hence the activities of the indviduals and groups that constitute it will shift into a different mode of operating. What is perhaps less intuitive is the fact that such shifts may occur voluntarily when enough individuals agree to make them happen. That's another reason why this book should be read in conjunction with Tribal Leadership.
I like the vision that the authors have in this book, and believe their prescriptions are sound advice for carrying out transformational change within an organization. There is so much theory compacted into a short book, however, that it is a bit difficult to digest, and is probably best used in conjunction with training by somebody familiar with the theory. (The authors are also professional consultants with an impressive track record of helping organizations achieve transformational change.)
As a final note, I was reminded by this book of this post on how Thomas Schelling's concept of focal points is useful in facilitating institutional change, and this book review on how the culture of reformed Protestantism may have influenced the Founding Fathers. There is more to be said about insitutional design than is captured by the static mental models of economic equilibrium taught in law and business schools, and this book is a good contribution to the evolution of these mental models.
UPDATE: If you're interested in systems theory in business, then you might also like some of the books and papers published by Prof. John Sterman at MIT.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Per new FTC rules, I want to disclose that I received a free copy of this book before providing the review here. I guess they found me because of my earlier review of Tribal Leadership and thought I'd be interested. I probably would have written a nice review if I didn't feel myself pulled in that direction by my desire to get more free books in the future!
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