Three Laws of Performance
The best-selling book, Three Laws of Performance was written by Steve Zaffron of The Vanto Group and Dave Logan of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
One of the authors, Steve Zaffron is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Worldwide.
In this blog, we will be discussing the first law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.
The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.”
Another way of stating this is how people act or behave correlates to how people, things or situations occur to them.
What does this mean?
Our action always make complete sense to us, however, we are often confused, frustrated or annoyed by the actions of others. But the people taking these actions are somehow not confused, frustrated or annoyed like we are. How is that? The circumstances in which they are acting occur to them differently than they do to you and they are acting accordingly to how the circumstances occur to them.
We as humans confuse the actual facts of a situation with how the situation occurs to us. There is a distinction between the facts and how the facts occur to us. This is how there can be a car accident with 20 witnesses and 18 different stories of what happened. It occurred to each person differently. A fact is that one car involved in the accident was going 40 miles per hour. To one observer, the car could have occurred as going very fast, while that same car could have been going rather slow to another because one observer was a five year old and the other was a race car driver.
How does this apply?
The same situations occur differently to different people, giving different actions.
Lets take a party for example. One person could be sitting in a corner and another could be in the center of the room talking with everyone. Why the different behavior?
The easy answer is because one likes parties and the other does not, or one is shy and the other is not. However, it is the different occurring for each person that gives liking or not liking parties, or being or not being shy. The occurring for the person in the corner could be that, “big groups are uncomfortable and risky” while the occurring for the socialite could be that, “new people are great!” After seeing the distinct ways the same situation occurs for two different people, it is simple to understand the distinct sets of actions.
The occurring is what gives the actions, being perfectly correlated with each other.
It is now easier to understand the different things people do, the ways they behave and their performances are all given by the way the situation occurs to them in a business or organizational setting as well.
If people are doing things to your disliking, that are confusing or are frustrating, it is because the situation at hand occurs for them differently that it does for you.