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The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life

Steve Zaffron, Dave Logan

August 2011

This book has shaped how we think about performance, feedback, growth, leadership, or culture.

Overview​

When something at work isn't going smoothly, managers struggle with what part of the problem to tackle first. Do they start with cost reduction? Or should they go for process improvements first? The authors, who have helped hundreds of companies and individuals change and improve, say spend time and money adjusting the systems in which people operate, rather than targeting people and their performance directly. The authors show that it is possible to change everything at once, with a focus on making such transformations permanent and repeatable.

Key ideas​

  • The book argues that performance is shaped by how people experience their situation, not only by incentives, capability, or process design.
  • The first law is that how people perform correlates with how situations occur to them. If work feels pointless, risky, unfair, or impossible, performance follows that interpretation.
  • The second law points to language: the way people describe a situation shapes what options seem available.
  • The third law focuses on future-based language. A shared, credible future can change how the present occurs to people and make different action possible.
  • The practical emphasis is system-level change. Instead of only correcting individuals, leaders should change the conversations, commitments, and context that produce behavior.

Practical use​

  • Listen for how people describe the current reality before prescribing a fix.
  • Reframe stuck problems by changing the shared language around them: what happened, what it means, and what future the team is committing to.
  • Use leadership conversations to create ownership and possibility, not just compliance with a new plan.
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Audio versionThe Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life
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