An old man was walking home late one night when he saw a friend on his knees under a street light, searching for something. "What are you doing?" he asked his friend.
"I dropped the key to my house."
"I'll help you look." After a few minutes of frustrated searching, the old man asked, "Where exactly were you when you dropped this key?"
His friend pointed toward the darkness. "Over there."
"Then why are you looking for it here?"
"Because this is where the light is."
This Sufi parable illustrates something that is all too common in companies and personal lives: many of us search for, but can't ever seem to find, the key to performance.
The search itself makes sense. Performance is what matters, and that comes down to actions taken by individuals. Unless people's actions shift, new strategies will fail, merger and acquisition goals will go unrealized, and new technologies won't deliver on their goals. On the personal side, unless we alter our actions, we'll never keep our New Year's resolution, improve our family life, or enhance our finances.
Consider that this description is accurate. Despite the billions that companies spend to refine strategies, redo reporting relationships, acquire companies, or be acquired—nevertheless, performance gains, which are usually the whole point, remain just out of reach. Without performance elevation, most efforts eventually fail.
How is it that, with all we know in the twentyfirst century, performance gains aren't more forthcoming?
Consider that we're searching for the key to performance in the illumination provided by knowledge. If we have a problem, we check to see whether we know a solution, and if we don't, we go to people who are experts and ask them—by hiring consultants, reading books, or searching web sites. But as Jeffrey Pfeffer showed in The Knowing-Doing Gap, more information often doesn't translate into different action. We are searching for the key to performance in places it's easy to look for, rather than in the dark, unfamiliar, hidden places.
This chapter picks up where Chapter One left off. If we can shift how a situation occurs, new action will follow. Enough new actions from enough people will move the needle on performance. The key to performance, we assert, lies in the complex workings of occurrence—and that is the focus of this chapter.
Once found, the key to performance will allow you to alter your actions, and work with others to alter theirs, to take performance to a new level.
In this chapter, it's useful to think of a performance challenge that you or others are facing—either the same one you used in the last chapter or a new one. We'll move through cases and discussions, stopping along the way to consider your challenge in light of this material.
The story of the Polus Group shows a company that hit a performance challenge, and how they found the key to turning the situation around.
In the aftermath of World War II, Toshimi Nakauchi's business education started when he and his wife sold bananas on the streets of Tokyo. "Bananas are one of the staples," his widow told us in 2007, "and that's what he was looking for—something people would always want." Reflecting back on those times, including raising three young children, his widow told us, "It was really hard." Smiling, she said, "I would put Kojiro [her middle son] inside a box of bananas to sleep during business hours."
Nakauchi's entrepreneurial interests pulled him toward real estate. Eventually he told one of his suppliers that he was planning to move on. The man tried to talk him out of his decision. "How much do you want to earn?" was the supplier's question to Nakauchi. "Ten thousand yen per day" was his answer, an outrageous number that was four times as much as the owner of the banana company was receiving.
Time proved that Nakauchi wasn't merely wishing. He became so successful that he built his own house, even adding a second floor for his office. He read, he studied, he questioned, and he demonstrated a knack for investing in land that quickly appreciated in value. He added to this investment strategy by building houses on his land and attracting talented colleagues; within a few years he was looking at a massively expanding business.
His search for good land values led to the village of Koshigaya, where, hundreds of years earlier, travelers would rest on their way to a mountaintop Shinto holy place called Nikko, the burial site of a famous shogun. Today, Koshigaya is a town of light industry and homes, known for its "Daruma dolls," which symbolize strong determinism and good fortune while memorializing the spread of Buddhism from India to China.
He imagined the day when he and his colleagues would be at the center of the housing industry around which the rest of the industry would rotate, much as Confucius considered the North Star (Polaris) to be for the heavens. In July 1969, he named the company the Polus Group to capture this vision.
As a man of vision, Nakauchi designed his company to become a large conglomerate from the beginning. For example, when the Polus Group employed just twenty people, he brought in a personnel specialist from the government to teach the executives how to organize human resources for growth. The expert was trained by the U.S. Army during the occupation of Japan and later was in charge of setting up the personnel systems at Honda.
Houses designed by the Polus Group have a signature look—modern and multifaceted, many with porches. Their large windows and light woods are warm and inviting, resembling upscale developments in beach communities in the United States.
The president took special care to forge personal relationships with employees, joking that he was able to remember everyone's name only up through the one-thousandth hire. He emphasized education, believing that "top crest" individuals had a key message that could build the capacity of the company's staff. He brought in management thinkers, artists, even a famous Olympic volleyball coach, to lecture to employees. The founder asked each speaker to record the essence of their message in Japanese calligraphy. Today, these framed documents hang around the Polus Group's conference rooms and offices.
As the Polus Group grew to become the large conglomerate it is today, his three sons took positions as managers in the growing firm. Nakauchi's leadership combined vision, operational excellence, and strong relationships.
In 1999, the founder suffered an incapacitating stroke. The leadership void in the Polus Group was unexpected and devastating. One senior manager told us: "We had a visionary leading our work and then, all of a sudden, we didn't know what to do." Homma, the head of human resources, said, "We lost our future."
Nakauchi's incapacitation caused people both inside the Polus Group and outside to wonder if the family-owned company could continue to grow, or would even survive. Could his three sons provide the leadership, relationship, vision, and experience that their father had?
Despite their personal sadness and grief, they made one good-faith effort after another to move ahead without their leader—discussing reorganizations, new roles, different strategies.
The company had a lot of talent to draw on. Each of the president's sons seems to have one of his gifts. The oldest, Keitaro, is a visionary leader. Kojiro, the middle brother, targets operational excellence. Akio, the youngest, focuses on relationships.
Still, nothing seemed to work. Several people told us, "We kept spinning through the same issues, over and over." It was conversation without end, argument without resolution.
In their words, they were "sinking into confusion," had "no charisma in the group," were "stagnating," with "no energy," "tired," and "muddled." Their most common word was "stuck."
If the individuals had been bound in ropes, they would have found a way to untie them or cut them loose. Unfortunately, the ties that held them were not so obvious. As people told us, "We didn't know what was holding us back."
What was holding them back was outside the boundaries of where they were looking—in the dark, not in the light of their knowledge.
"Business as usual" explanations of the Polus Group's situation would focus on succession planning, strategy, or roles and responsibilities. But consider that something much deeper was at work. As we will see, these deeper issues are likely at work in your performance challenge as well.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, the people in the company were tied up in knots of language—knots composed of words, symbols, sentences, and communication that somehow had blocked and impeded performance. The result was repetitive and unproductive behavior, mostly done with the best of intentions.
How situations occur is inseparable from language. We know of no bolder illustration of this fact than the case of Helen Keller, who had learned only a few words before she lost her sight and hearing to an illness when she was eighteen months old. Seven years later, she learned sign language through her tutor, Anne Sullivan. Keller describes her life before meeting Sullivan, and the moment when she learned language:
For nearly six years I had no concepts whatever of nature or mind or death or God. I literally thought with my body. Without a single exception my memories of that time are tactual. I was impelled like an animal to seek food and warmth. I remember crying, but not the grief that caused the tears.... I was like an unconscious clod of earth. Then, suddenly, I knew not how or where or when, my brain felt the impact of another mind, and I awoke to language, to knowledge of love, to the usual concepts of nature, of good and evil! I was actually lifted from nothingness to human life.[3]
How the world occurred to Keller, once she learned language, shifted more dramatically than most of us can imagine. Notice that language wasn't something she understood bit by bit as her teacher taught her various signs. Language grabbed her, reshaping every part of her awareness in a moment of awakening. She captured the experience when she wrote that before the moment she "knew only darkness and stillness ... my life was without past or future ... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living."[4]
After learning language, the past and future appeared to her, like television screens turning on for the first time. For the rest of her life, Keller drew audiences for her lectures and readers for her books, as much for the uniqueness of her outlook as for the drama of her life's story. She saw language for what it is: a force that makes us human, that gives us a past and a future, that allows us to dream, to plan, to set and realize goals.
Most of us are too young when we begin to acquire language to recall that moment for ourselves. It seems that language has always been with us, like breathing. We don't pay attention to its presence.
But consider: Language is the means through which your future is already written. It is also the means through which it can be rewritten. For people at the Polus Group, and all of us, there's good news in this insight.
The people at the Polus Group couldn't change the fact of the president's incapacitation. In our lives there are facets that are beyond our control. In fact, consider your performance challenge. Your boss, your finances, your children, your industry, your country—are all resistant to change. (Did your parents try to change you? How well did that go?) But as the First Law of Performance says, your actions correlate with how these occur to you, not to the facts themselves.
The key to performance is hiding in a particular facet of language that we'll get to in the next section. First, we have to map the connections of language and occurrence.
Language is used here in the broadest sense. It includes not only spoken and written communication, but also body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, pictures and drawings, music, how people dress, and any other actions that have symbolic intent.
Untying the knots of language begins with seeing that whenever you say something, other communication is carried along with it. We call this phenomenon the unsaid but communicated. Sometimes the sender is aware of the unsaid; often they are not. The unsaid is the most important part of language when it comes to elevating performance.
The unsaid but communicated includes (but is not limited to) assumptions, expectations, disappointments, resentments, regrets, interpretations, significance, and issues that occur as dangerous.
We all know what it's like to talk to someone who is hiding something. He often appears as evasive, detached, distant, or disconnected. What he's hiding is in the unsaid, but the way he comes across communicates that something is off. Think of an entire group of coworkers hiding things from each other, and you'll see the impact the unsaid has on performance.
You can feel and experience the unsaid but communicated. Observe a family having dinner in a restaurant and you'll notice the way family members occur to each other. You may not be able to hear anything they are saying, but in watching you may see that one person broadcasts "How long is this going to last?" Another emits "It's great being together," and a third conveys "When are they going to get along? And I wonder if anybody notices."
When you walk into a company for a meeting, make a sales call, or apply for a job, you can see, instantly, how the company occurs to employees, and how people occur to each other. Like little cartoon bubbles floating over people's heads, you can read what people are not saying but are communicating. The messages run the gamut, from "I'm so bored and I wonder what's for lunch," to "My work is more important than yours." This communication is channeled in many different ways—in what people say, how they say it, their gestures, tones, eye contact, and so on. If you turn up your antennae to pick up the unsaid, it can be overwhelming. It seems to spring from the essence of who people are, and comes through in every encounter. Just to make it through the day, we often turn our antennae off.
Now we get to an aspect of communication that writes our future without our even realizing it. It is the part of language that exists outside the light of our attention.
We call this aspect that which is unsaid and communicated without awareness. It determines and shapes which messages are possible, not possible, important, unimportant, relevant, not relevant, appropriate, not appropriate, and so on. The unawareness aspect puts this part of language outside our control. Until we find leverage on this part of language, the future is written and can't be altered.
Altering what was unsaid and communicated without awareness was the key to turning around the Polus Group. The process starts with becoming aware of what people aren't saying but are communicating.
For most people, exploring the unsaid is like walking into a cave—the journey goes from bright to dim to pitch black. It starts with people saying what they have been thinking. After a time, the person will say something and feel surprised by what she has just said, as if another person uttered the words. The expression on her face shifts from remembering to exploring—as if she's discovering the terrain by touch. The further a person goes, the more she needs a guide who knows the terrain of the unsaid.
At the Polus Group, Keitaro felt bound and trapped by his situation, including his sudden ascent to power, his relative youth in the position, the loyalty that employees felt to the founder but not to him, and so on. It wasn't the actual situation that bound him; it's what he and others made the situation mean, through language—and didn't talk about.
In the confidences of one-on-one meetings, people were initially concerned about their answers, careful about what they said and didn't say.
Consultants helped people examine the unsaid. As the process continued, people went from disclosing what they thought but never said to discovering what was lurking behind their thoughts and opinions. When all was said and done, for each person, what they weren't saying was some variant of the same thing: I'm doing the best I can but other people's agendas are keeping what I'm doing from working. If only the founder were here, he would fix it, but he's not, so all I can do is just keep trying.
At the Polus Group, the unsaid, and especially the unsaid that people were unaware of, left people with no space to create anything new. They were resigned as a result of this knotted language that influenced and determined their behavior. They were bound, trapped, and had no room to design new ways of moving forward or fulfilling the opportunities of the business. This lack of freedom was a direct result of the unsaid that influenced how the situation occurred.
The unsaid and communicated but without awareness became linguistic clutter. The clutter was so widespread that people didn't have the freedom to create something new. We all know the feeling of trying to work at a desk that's cluttered with papers, folders, and sticky notes. There's no space in which to work. What's already there prevents anything new from happening. A closet with boxes and clothes that fall out when you open the door has no space for anything new. It can't be used for its purpose—storage—because it's already packed with stuff. You have to create a space, a clearing, and a sense that "nothing is in my way" so that you can put something new on the desk or in the closet.
Thinking about cluttered physical spaces gives us insights into what happens in situations in which people are bound by knots of language. Such situations occur as tiring, chaotic—things in the wrong place—and unfinished—letters on a desk screaming to be read, boxes in a closet demanding to be unpacked.
At the Polus Group, with the clutter squeezing out room to create, people rehashed old issues: roles and responsibilities, strategy, and what actions people should take. Without space, all that the Polus Group leaders could do was have another conversation, but they kept having the same discussion over and over—like in the movie Groundhog Day. The way it occurred to people was much like trying to push another box into an already full closet.
The key to performance isn't pushing new conversations about strategy or reorganization into an already crammed space; rather, it's clearing out the clutter.
Almost universally, it's the unsaid that's cluttered for individuals, groups, and organizations. Before anything new can happen, people need to make space by doing the linguistic equivalent of clearing out closets. This means moving issues into the light of discussion—saying them, examining them in public. The point here isn't to say every passing thought, or dump out every judgment or evaluation on everyone. It's certainly not to say every random thought that comes from your inner voice.
The point is to notice that there are issues constraining people because of what they aren't saying. When people can address and articulate the unsaid, space begins to open up. People can discuss—openly and in public—what's holding them back and what to do about it. Much like moving things out of the closet and into the room, people can sort through issues, perspectives, and grievances, with the intent of making more space.
The oldest son, Keitaro, heard about Steve's previous work with organizations in Japan, and asked for proposals that would break the Polus Group's leadership stalemate. The consulting team began an initial process of discovery that resulted in a multistage plan, based on the Three Laws of Performance. The promise of the plan was to get the Polus Group unstuck.
Over dinner, Homma, the HR executive, put forward an idea so radical, it was almost unimaginable in Japan. Leaning forward, he said: "Stevesan, if we were to implement this plan of getting unstuck, we really need to start with just the family and board of directors."
Steve asked whether a foreigner would be allowed into so intimate a process.
Homma's response was, "We've always been a courageous company. If people think this is the way out of the trap we're in, I'm sure they'll take the risk."
The family and board of directors—eleven people—were about to embark on a unique journey made possible by the Three Laws of Performance. In particular, getting this small group unstuck required them to find and use the key to performance. We have the same goal for the readers of this chapter.
To appreciate the journey of exploring the unsaid, we need to go back to our analogy of the cave. Imagine someone exploring in absolute darkness, going by touch alone. As he crawls, inch by inch, he's looking for recognizable objects: sudden drops, stalactites, water, and the like. If he finds a rough ridge growing from the floor up, he knows it's a stalagmite, and roughly how large it will be, and that he needs to crawl around it. His most valuable asset is his awareness of what sorts of things lurk in caves.
Likewise, as we move through the unsaid, there are forms and objects to look for. The first is the inner voice, which is the voice in your head that is constantly talking about everything and anything. You could consider it thinking, but it is really a conversation that you are having with yourself. Our internal voice runs so constantly that we mostly don't notice it. It has the quality of being like air to the bird or water to the fish—always present and never noticed.
Our internal voice is always asking and answering questions, such as: Is this true? Is this false? Is this right? Is this wrong? Is this good? Is this bad? What's the problem? What's the solution? What's the answer? What's the question? Why should I do this? How should I do this? Do I agree? Do I disagree? What's in it for me? What's in it for him or her or them?
In fact, if you take a moment right now and look at some of the commentary that you have been having with yourself about what you're reading, you'll hear your internal voice in action. The way this book occurs to you has a lot to do with the conversations you are bringing to it. This internal voice—the voice in your head that we're inviting you to listen to at this very moment—is talking to you so constantly that you can't turn it off even when you try.
In particular, think about your performance challenge, and notice what your internal voice has to say. For most people, it's something like Maybe I'm not trying hard enough? Or I'm just plain unlucky? Will this book help? Probably not, but it would be nice if it did.
Most of the time, the inner voice repeats old thoughts. Only rarely does it say anything new. And yet, it takes up a lot of our awareness. Notice that your inner voice probably won't produce any novel solutions to your performance challenge.
As we continue our trek into the unsaid and continue the analogy of the cave, the interior grows darker. It's here that we find a form that most people aren't trained to spot. It's called a racket.
Becoming aware of rackets, and taking responsibility for them, is one of the most important aspects in elevating performance.
A racket has four elements. First, there is a complaint that has persisted for some time. A common one in marriages: "He's late again!" (Notice that "he's late again" swirls in the wife's internal voice.) Second, there is a pattern of behavior that goes along with the complaint. The wife may act irritated, aloof, and withdrawn. ("I'm really mad and disappointed" echoes in her internal voice.) People are generally aware of these first two elements.
Before moving on to the next two elements you might notice if your performance challenge has a racket associated with it. What's the complaint? Maybe this isn't working. Or no one is giving me the help I need. What's the pattern of behavior that goes with the complaint? Maybe it's acting withdrawn, or snapping at people. Notice that the complaint and the pattern of behavior are married. The complaint elicits the pattern of behavior, again and again. For some people, the pattern of behavior is so entrenched that others think that's who he is.
Continuing with our racket example, the third element is a payoff for having this complaint continue. The wife gets to be right, makes her husband wrong, avoids the domination of her husband (or what occurs to her as her husband's domination by being late), and lets her regain her control of the situation. The fourth element is the cost of this behavior. For every payoff, there's a cost. The cost here may be that the wife loses closeness with her husband, as well as intimacy, expression, satisfaction, and vitality. The last two pieces—the payoff and the cost—live in the unsaid and unaware.
What about the racket you identified? What's the payoff? Maybe it helps me cope or I avoid the domination of this person/situation or I get to be right. The payoff is what keeps the racket going, often for years.
What about the cost? Is it self-expression? Joy? A feeling of being alive? It was the cost of rackets, as we'll see, that was largely responsible for the Polus Group being tied up in knots.
People often ask, "Why is this called a racket?" Think back to the days of Prohibition in the United States and you'll see why. Some restaurants were fronts for illegal bars. The restaurant masqueraded as something other than what it really was: a cover for an illicit operation. The restaurant was a racket.
In our example, at first glance, it appears that the wife is upset at her husband for being late. In fact, she gets a payoff that may be worth far more than punctuality: she gets to be right and feel superior. She also has a card that will allow her to be late sometime in the future, as payback. What appears to be a legitimate complaint is actually a play for power.
As an aside, rackets inside of relationships are always perfectly paired. The husband here also has a racket of being late—whereby he gets to make his wife wrong for making him wrong. After all, "Why doesn't she appreciate how hard I'm working to keep us above water?"
The wife (and husband) running their "late again!" rackets are paying a price, about which they are both unaware. Yet the price is communicated in many conversations between them. For those who observe them, it is easily seen: a lack of intimacy, a constant state of being withdrawn, and ongoing resentment. It is unsaid and communicated, affecting the quality and experience of the relationship.
Think about your racket. Can you see how the complaint might be a disguise for something deeper, such as a way of controlling a situation, or avoiding the domination of another person?
Our promise to you is that reading this book will lead to an ability to elevate performance. You can now see why. You'll have more power over a situation when you can label something a racket or can identify that what holds you back has something to do with how a situation occurs to you. It's not unlike a physician finding leverage over what holds people back from good health by correctly labeling an illness.
There's a reason people join communities when they make an in-depth study of something, like business or law. The support of others is important, and part of the study is learning to use a new language.
We suggest you make reading this book a group effort. Find others who are interested in elevating performance, and go through chapters with them. Discuss together your performance challenges and what you're learning from this book.
Whether you're reading alone or with others, we encourage you to create a community of committed leaders. If you do this, you will enhance your ability to elevate performance.
At the Polus Group, many persistent complaints arose from what people believed were old agreements. Executives and family members told Steve's team about several agreements they had made:
The brothers will work out individual differences in private.
The oldest brother will run the company.
The company will operate in three separate divisions, each run by a brother.
Decisions require consent of the family.
The oldest brother would make decisions, and the others would object—thinking we agreed that decisions require consent of the family. The oldest brother would then shrug off the complaint, because of the agreement to work out problems in private. Their internal voices were filled with chatter about how the others weren't living up to what they said they would do.
It's important to note that many of these old agreements were never actually agreed to. Executives told Steve's team that the method of making decisions was ambiguous, while others insisted that these agreements were as real as anything on paper with signatures. Still, agreed to or not, they formed the basis of persistent complaints and took up much of the bandwidth in people's internal voices.
Although people in the situation are unaware of cost, an observer trained in the Three Laws can see it. Like a seasoned cave explorer, someone trained in the Three Laws knows a racket is at work when people act resigned and detached, not seeming to enjoy their work or each other's company, yet keeping up as good a front as they can. This was the case at the Polus Group. People looked isolated and resigned yet resolute that they would keep going on for the founder's sake.
Likewise, someone trained in the Three Laws can also see the payoff that people get for running their racket. After the founder's incapacitation, each of the brothers, and the board of directors as a whole, experienced the threat and risk of being unsure who would run the company and whether it would survive. Each of them was concerned about who would be in control and about not losing the control they already had. By running their rackets, they got to avoid the domination of each other and the situation itself. Although ineffective, this behavior occurred as the only option.
Everyone was trying their best, but the old agreements contradicted one another and tied the brothers and board of directors into knots. The oldest brother would make a decision, then the others would reject it. When no one made decisions, the executives looked to the family, which looked to the board, which looked back to the family. Throughout the process, people acted out rackets—fixed ways of behaving coupled with persistent complaints. Their internal voices were thick with objections, complaints, and words of despair. The net result was that the situation occurred as no space to create anything new.
Looking from your performance challenge, think about situations that hold you back, and you may be able to notice other rackets. Start with your internal voice and listen for complaints that have persisted for some time. Notice what you gain from having that complaint continue: probably something like being right, making others wrong, being justified, invalidating others, escaping from responsibility, and avoiding a dominating situation. Then begin to see the cost—it's usually some combination of love, health, happiness, and self-expression.
When we see the power of the unsaid, two compelling insights become clear. The first is that the situation is absurd. How the situation occurs to us is given by language, yet it occurs to people to be as real as a wall. You can bump into a wall, but you can't bump into the words that people reported were accurate descriptions of the Polus Group: "stuck," "difficult," "stressful," and "uncertain." Noticing that people were bound up in knots of language is, in itself, a freeing insight. We can untie the knots of language with different language.
The second insight leads to action: clear out the unsaid. Do this by saying what is unsaid and deal with it. At the Polus Group, discussing which agreements were real and which were imagined went a long way toward creating space. Getting the payoff and costs out into the open helped people discard some old conversations and make room for new conversations.
No matter how smart or insightful people are, we are all prone to being hijacked by what is unsaid—especially the unsaid about which people are unaware. Before moving more deeply into the Polus Group, we'll take a moment and examine how an understanding of the Second Law can dramatically shift a relationship between two people. This situation happened at the Harvard Business School.
A group of six scholars in the Harvard Business School, led by Michael Jensen, had been researching and teaching new ideas about how firms, in many cases, actually destroy wealth. They were, in their own words, a group of rogue scholars. They were loyal and collegial with one another, having put their reputations on the line by joining the group. For example, Mal Salter, a senior professor at the Harvard Business School, was invited to join the group and did so because he was interested in mastering a new emerging subject field.
After some years of being the "renegades," the business school presented them with the opportunity to become a formal faculty unit, requiring them to establish a clear mission statement, a research agenda, and a program for attracting and developing new faculty. Jensen wanted the group to be more than a formality—he sought a culture of openness and respect, aligned around a common vision. He wanted it to be a genuine team, of the caliber rarely found in academia.
As Jensen said to us:
We had been stuck in the mud, with complications of a renegade group that wasn't part of the organization for years. Now we were going to be an officially sanctioned group within the Harvard Business School. We were having a hard time "coming in from the cold." We weren't sure we wanted to be a sanctioned unit. We enjoyed being renegades and throwing intellectual hand grenades.
When the group met with Steve in July 1997, they listed many outcomes that would make their initial two days together surpass expectations. Most in the group, including a world-renowned psychologist, didn't think any of these goals could be achieved in a mere two days.
In the meeting, Steve asked people to list their persistent complaints about each other—beginning to probe the unsaid. Then he invited people to say what these were—and move them into the realm of the said. This would take some courage on their parts, opening up and saying what wasn't being said. After silence that seemed unending, Salter was the first to speak. He said that he and Jensen were friends and colleagues, and that he had immense respect for Jensen's work. He added, with a slight smile, that "Mike is sometimes headstrong and doesn't listen." He said it as though he was saying something that was descriptively true.
Steve pointed out that persistent complaints, by their very nature, aren't true descriptions of anything, although they are real as complaints. Here's what happened:
Salter: What do you mean my complaints aren't true? I love Michael, but he's headstrong and doesn't listen; just ask anyone.
Steve: Mal, that's a complaint you have about Michael, yes?
Salter: Yes.
Steve: The nature of a complaint is that something should not be the way that it is.
Salter: Right, Michael should not be as headstrong as he is, and he should listen.
Steve: That's your complaint about Michael; it's not Michael. It's actually a judgment about Michael.
Salter: Yes, that's my judgment about Michael.
Steve: It's a real complaint, but it's not a real description of facts about Michael.
Salter: Oh ... [long pause] I don't know.
Given it was late in the day, Steve added, "Just think about it overnight, OK?"
The next morning, Salter walked in smiling at some insight he had developed. "I thought about our conversation all night," he said excitedly, "and you're right. It's just a persistent complaint! I realized there are times Michael has listened, obviously. And even when he doesn't, my complaining about it makes no difference. I get it."
Salter saw something of profound importance for performance. When something is lurking in the unsaid, it has the flavor—the occurrence—of being descriptively true. But it's nothing more than language—constructed and changeable.
Further, Salter saw that this bit of language in the unsaid was blinding him to behavior that contradicted it. In his mind, the fact was that Jensen was headstrong and didn't listen and, as a fact, left him working around the issue. Although Jensen and he continued to have a good working relationship, Salter knew it was less optimal than what was possible. As Salter told us years later, the team's productivity and learning had slowed down. What the Second Law reveals is that this slowdown—or as Jensen put it, a sense of "being stuck in the mud"—was a result of the unsaid at work—in this case, determining the way Jensen "was" for Salter. Further, Salter's conversations—with himself and with others—reinforced that "Michael is headstrong and doesn't listen." How Jensen occurred for Salter blinded him to behavior inconsistent with this label of the man. Through the act of moving the persistent complaint from the unsaid to the said, where it could be seen and discussed for what it was, his relationship with Jensen was elevated—or in Salter's words, "created clarity and openness of a new kind, accelerating the learning process in the team." Once he saw the complaint for what it was, Salter could build a stronger relationship with Jensen, in which he could make new requests to address his original concern. Salter elevated his ability to be an engaged partner in the relationship. All of this movement began with the linguistic equivalent of clearing out the closet.
In 2007, we interviewed Salter about what had happened all those years ago. He said: "The notion that behavior is a function of how the situation appears to be to the person ... to me, that cuts like a hot knife through butter." He added: "That's a big idea."
For years this group had been running away from being a formal faculty unit within the Harvard Business School. After this session, they were able, as a group, to make a commitment to a strategy of creating a new faculty unit. A month later they met and finished their work. The group was accepted as a unit within in the Harvard Business School, and over the years it has grown into one of the school's largest units.
Seeing this law at work has a dramatic impact on performance, as it begins to loosen the grip of absolute certainty that makes workplace conflict so entrenched. Once the people at Lonmin saw that their conclusions about other groups—management about the unions, each union about other unions, and so on—were lurking in the unsaid, allowing no space for listening, they were suddenly more able to listen. Even in cases in which people are already working effectively with others—like that of Professor Salter at the Harvard Business School—there is the possibility of accelerating and elevating their performance level by clearing out the unsaid. When people see the Second Law in action, they are often able to let go of their righteousness and take a big step toward collaboration. They can sort out the unsaid together, in public—discarding the bits that hold people back, and thereby opening up space. As we'll see in the next chapter, people can then fill the new space with a new vision that does what was impossible while people were stuck.
"I found this to be nothing short of incredible," Jensen told us. "With all the debris left on the road, we probably would have failed in the long run if we had not had this intervention."
You may notice your persistent complaints about situations and other people. Consider that they don't reside in reality, but in the unsaid of language, where they take on the occurrence of reality. (Remember the reality illusion.) Notice that as long as you take these persistent complaints to be true, you are "at the effect of them"—that is, your actions will be defensive, consistent with the way the situation occurs to you. By seeing that these gripes are the result of language at work, they become something you can impact—and we'll see a lot more about how to do this in the next chapter. Again, notice all four elements of a racket: the complaint, the pattern of behavior, the payoff, and the cost. For now, see the gears of the said and unsaid—language at work. More than a few people have reported that this insight starts a cascade of other insights that alters performance.
We now return to the Polus Group, where their journey to find and use the key to performance was about to begin. Like the Harvard Business School, they had issues in the unsaid that needed to be examined; but with so many people involved, the tangle of language and the solutions required were more complex.
As we move through this section, you might reflect on how this situation is like yours. What insights can you derive from this example that apply to your performance challenge?
The situation at the Polus Group was built on top of a web of personal dynamics, each strand of which was as powerful as what happened at the Harvard Business School. The risky program that Homma, the HR executive, described over dinner with Steve became known as "Stage 0," as it needed to happen before "Stage 1" that would involve all the senior managers.
Stage 0 began in the fall of 2001 with the four family members and seven other members of the board of directors. Beginning with a series of in-depth individual interviews with each of the participants, the entire group then went through a three-day process based on the Three Laws of Performance. The process allowed each person, and the group as a whole, to look into their individual and collective blind spots (the unsaid and unaware) in such a way that issues moved from the background to the foreground. The result, Steve promised, was that people would get unstuck and performance would make a major jump forward—even in areas where people felt resigned.
It's never easy in the early stages of this process for people to look into the dark and hidden aspects of the unsaid and articulate what is depriving them of space. It takes courage on the part of the participants and intentionality on the part of the facilitator.
Much of the first day was spent looking into the complaints people had. The most significant collective issue was people's regret over the loss of their leader. The theme of what people said was if only he were here, we would know where to go next. At the end of the first day no one was sure that anything significant would be accomplished. After all, they said, "These issues had been going on for years."
As often happens in this kind of process when people sleep on it overnight, things looked different the next day, as insights began to form that allowed people to articulate the unsaid. Others began to see that their view of the company and each other was colored by the loss of the founder and how they interpreted that situation. They began to see that they had taken as a given that the glory days of the company were over and they would never again be in a position of leading the industry. Because this was the way that it was and the way that it would be, all that was left to them would be learning to live with this new reality. Somehow, they would have to muddle through by doing the best they could in these "hard times." Until Stage 0, all of this was unsaid.
A critical point of this chapter is this: giving voice to the unsaid creates space. If the process went no further, this newfound room would allow people to choose a new direction for the company. Chapter Three shows how to take advantage of this new space to create something dramatically new.
Steve used several methods to explore the unsaid. In particular, he showed the structure of a racket and invited them to map this structure onto their situation.
As people said what their rackets were, the dynamic in the company shifted. The payoff of a racket works only because it operates below awareness. Disclosing a racket has the same effect you would get from hanging a sign that says "Alcohol Served Here" on the front of the Prohibition-era bar posing as a restaurant. The jig is up. The façade no longer works.
People noticed that, with this group racket in place, the future of the Polus Group was already written.
Turning to your performance challenge, what would happen if you disclosed your racket to those it affects? The racket would lose its impact, just as happened in the Polus Group, and you would then need to address the underlying issues.
Most rackets begin with a complaint over which the person feels no sense of power. You might check to see if this was the case for you. If so, disclosing the racket will bring you back to that complaint and allow you to deal with it in a way that will give you a sense of power. We'll get to that part of the process in the next chapter.
Another of the methods that Steve and his team used to probe the unsaid was to have the family members and executives write a letter to the founder that expressed how his incapacitation impacted them. Steve asked them to include in their letter anything they needed to say, anything they needed to forgive or be forgiven for, anything they needed to take responsibility for, or anything they needed to give up. In doing so, people used language to probe their blind spots and move issues into actual discussion where the impact could be dissipated.
As people wrote their letters, some cried, others looked thoughtful, some smiled with the memories of his vision, hard work, and gentle style. When everyone had finished writing, people read their letters to the group. Part of Homma's letter says:
It has been three years since you [the president] got sick and were taken away from the management of our company. While we've been trying to develop our power as a group, there were many times things didn't work as well as they could.
I realize that in the background there's been grief and blame amongst ourselves and even with you, and now that I see this, I'm giving it up. I know that if you were here and able to tell me, you would want me to do that.
I take these insights as an opportunity for our management to come together and create a new vision. We have many powerful managers here, and it's a shame we haven't stepped forward as you would want us to. I'm certain that we have greater power than what we have expressed so far and now that we have gotten ourselves out of our way. I commit to you and myself that I will be a front-runner for a new future.
Some letters expressed gratitude to Nakauchi, thanking him for the career opportunities they'd had. Others said they loved him and acknowledged that they had been hoping for his return. People recalled the framed calligraphy in the conference room, his respect among Japanese business and government leaders, his beginnings from selling bananas after World War II.
As people articulated what hadn't been said before, issues came forward that, until then, had been invisible. Participants began to test the idea that, while the facts of the founder's incapacitation were indisputable, the impact of that loss and what it meant to each of them arose in language. So although they couldn't do anything about the founder's health condition (the facts), they might be able to alter how the situation occurred to them. The writing of the letters went a long way toward probing the unsaid, giving them room to articulate something new.
Keitaro, the oldest son, had two insights as people read their letters. First, he realized that what he thought was showing respect to his father was actually holding people back. When we interviewed Keitaro later about the program, he said, "I thought I was showing responsibility to my brothers by insisting we follow my father's strategies. But I see now that I was actually depriving them of the opportunity to be leaders." Again, articulating the unsaid creates the room to say something new.
Second, Keitaro said that he never saw himself as an executive. "I was not a leader who could lead and coordinate people. I was primarily a keeper of my father's legacy."
After these bits of the unsaid were articulated, people were able to have conversations they couldn't have before. Keitaro announced that he was now stepping up as a leader and "a coordinator of people." He added, "I now am ready and want my brothers to be leaders with me." Akio quietly asserted that "I'm going to involve the community in new ways as my father would have done." Homma stood up, surveying the entire group, and proclaimed, "I can't figure out our future by myself—but I am going to put together the people and process for living up to, and going beyond, what our founder would have wanted."
From the perspective of the Second Law, how the situation occurred to the family and executives altered. It went from If only he were here ... we would know where to go next to We can go beyond what our founder intended. This alteration in how the Polus Group occurred elicited new, elevated performance. People were no longer stuck.
Notice that these actions had a dual effect. Not only did they bring the unsaid into the said, and thus create space, but they also made the future less certain. It was as though, each step of the way, white paint was beginning to cover over an old painting. Soon there would be enough blank canvas on which to write a new future.
Rewriting the future begins with shifting how a person occurs to himself. Think of Laolong in Chapter One, the three brothers and all the executives at the Polus Group, and the professors at the Harvard Business School. As people move issues from the unsaid to the said, they occur to themselves to be more able, more powerful, more connected to each other. They move from being resigned (part of a racket) to inspired. Their business cultures, operations, and profits jump. Projects that once seemed impossible are now within reach. This is the essence of transformation: shifting the context and substance of people's lives and businesses, transforming everything, including oneself.
When we visited the Polus Group again in 2007, Keitaro had found himself as a strategist and CEO. He said that "while there are new problems and challenges, the issues of the past have disappeared."
Akio told us, "The biggest thing that came out of the program is that we were able to talk. I am listened to. The board and managers not only require my opinion, they actually want it." He spoke with confidence, offering ideas and making declarations about the company strategy.
In 2007, Nakauchi's widow (the mother of the three boys), who had sold bananas in the streets of Tokyo all those years ago, said, "It was dark after my husband's fall, but things have really lightened up a lot. The boys became leaders, the company has grown, and the family is closer together. I am happy."
Currently with more than two thousand employees, the company is on a growth spurt, with revenues of 110 billion yen (close to $1 billion). Of equal importance to employees, the Polus Group continues to receive more than its share of awards for design, environmental responsibility, and community relationships.
The Polus Group and the Harvard Business School examples reveal that people often look for performance gains in the wrong place: in trying to force conversations before making space for them. We've seen that the way to make space is to leverage the fact that how situations occur arises in language—and in fact, the key to performance lies in language. In particular, dampeners to performance live in the unsaid, especially in the unsaid and communicated but without awareness.
There are specific actions leaders can take to tap into the power of the Second Law of Performance:
Become aware of your persistent complaints, about people and situations. Notice that these cycle through your internal voice.
Notice that these complaints are interpretations of facts, not facts themselves.
See all four elements of rackets: the persistent complaint, the set way of behaving, the payoff, and the cost. See your rackets at work. We all have them.
Probe into the situation by writing down everything you need to say to others, including anything you need to say, anything you need to forgive or be forgiven for, anything you need to take responsibility for, or anything you need to give up (including the complaint itself).
Communicate what you discover to others in your work and life. Many people find that this action has a dramatic impact on performance.
In the next chapter, we'll explore what to do once you have created space: how to invent a new future that transforms how situations occur for people, leading to breakthrough performance.