The Anatomy of Performance

When most leaders aren't happy with the performance of their organization, they lean on one move: have people do more work. And what you often get from that is just more of the results you don't want — delivered faster, at a higher cost, by a more exhausted team.

There's got to be a better approach. There is. But to explain it, I have to take you back to before I knew anything about medicine.

Before the military trained me as a paramedic, here's everything I knew about the human body: there were bones, muscles, blood, a bunch of organs, and some other stuff holding it all together.

That was it.

So if somebody came to me with a numb foot, the best I could do was tell them to go see a doctor. I had no access to making a difference in that situation — because I didn't know what I was dealing with.

What paramedic school actually taught me

In paramedic school, I learned about the circulatory system. The nervous system. The skeletal system. The muscular system. And more importantly, I learned how each one interacts with the others.

The technical term for what I gained is distinction. When something is distinct, it's separate from something else — you can tell one thing apart from another. The body was no longer one big mass of blood and organs and muscle. It became a set of distinct systems with distinct interactions.

And here's what matters: when you have distinctions inside of whatever you're dealing with, you gain power and ability around that thing.

Now when somebody comes to me with a numb foot, I have actions available. I can assess sensation in both feet and compare them. I can check circulation. I can test reflexes. I can start narrowing down whether I'm looking at a nerve issue, a blood flow issue, or something structural.

Same foot. Same numbness. Completely different capacity to make a difference — because now the situation is distinct to me.

The low-performance trap

This is where the "more work" reflex comes from.

I see it in a lot of the leadership teams I work with: performance drops, and the only diagnostic tool anyone has is effort. I've got nothing against hard work. Sometimes effort really is the missing element. But rarely — rarely — is more effort the thing that actually makes the difference. Working harder on a numb foot doesn't fix the numb foot.

Here's the pattern underneath it: most people view work as stuff to do, and sometimes stuff to give other people to do. That's their entire anatomy of the organization. Tasks in, tasks out.

If that's how you see your organization, your options for making a difference are as limited as mine were before paramedic school. When performance drops, all you can prescribe is "more" — more hours, more meetings, more pressure. You're treating everything with the same tool because everything looks like the same thing.

Organizations have an anatomy too

What I find myself doing with clients now is giving them distinctions around performance — an anatomy of the organization. Because an organization isn't a pile of tasks any more than a body is a pile of organs. It has distinct systems, with distinct interactions, and low performance almost always lives in one of them.

Once a leadership team can see those systems as distinct, low performance stops being a mystery you throw effort at. You can assess it. Compare. Isolate where the breakdown actually lives. You have a much greater chance of making a difference — because you finally know what you're dealing with.

I'm not going to lay out the full anatomy here. That's not the point of this article, and honestly, reading about anatomy isn't what made me a paramedic. What made the difference was someone who already had the distinctions, handing them to me one at a time and showing me how to use them.

So here's the action

If your team's performance is low and your only diagnosis is "we need to work harder," you don't have a work-ethic problem. You have a distinctions problem. And you won't solve a distinctions problem from inside the view you already have — any more than I could have taught myself anatomy by staring harder at a numb foot.

So find somebody who has the distinctions. Somebody who can look at your organization and see distinct systems where you see a pile of work — and who can give those distinctions to you, so they become yours.

That's the work I do with organizations that are out to produce a higher level of results — without spending more money or hiring more people. If performance is low in your organization and more effort isn't moving the needle, reach out. I'd be glad to have that conversation with you.