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Performance Leadership
David M. Paschane, Ph.D.
Affiliations:
Associate Research Professor
University of Maryland (UMBC)
Principal Consultant
APLIN Science and Technology
Accepted to the 2012 Workshop on Information and Organizational Architecture,
Interdisciplinary Center for Organizational Architecture, Aarhus University, Denmark
This paper includes updates to technical details for the implementation of Performance
Architectural Science Systems (PASS). PASS is an integrated science and technology discipline for
facilitating recursive testing of performance analytics that fit performance leadership and
organizational architecture designs through light, agile technology configurations.
United States: 202-256-5763, Paschane.Aplin@gmail.com
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Performance Leadership
David M. Paschane, Ph.D.
While most organizations have managers for routine activities, and some have
leaders for future initiatives, few have leaders for lasting performance
capabilities.
Such leadership is difficult to nurture and sustain because it is a human skill,
herein called “performance leadership,” integrated with the design of
organizational architecture. If either the leader or the design are unable to keep
pace with the conditions driving change in or about the organization, both can
languish; and, if the organization cannot adapt, its alternative actions may
reinforce systemic problems in employees or organizational capabilities as a
whole.
Nearly all the business consulting, literature, and “solutions” in the market of
ideas address some component of the difficulty in developing and sustaining
performance leadership as an embedded and potentially wide-spread
capability.1 The desired capability is one that facilitates employees maturing
their skills, the organization adapting to change, and both the employees and the
organization managing performance in a dynamic context.
Herein, I draw from the experience of studying organizational performance in
one of the largest most entrenched bureaucracies, and examine the strengths
and weaknesses of disparate methods under various kinds of leadership, where
many well-intentioned employees and consultants have applied the market of
management ideas and have failed to sustain a lasting change in performance
leadership. Instead, cycles of management surges, effective or not, have fallen
victim to the powers of bureaucratic culture and structure.
Academically, I integrate scientific methods applied to human behavior,
organizational development, and system dynamics. The results are a prescribed
set of simple scientific methods, called Performance Architectural Science
Systems (PASS). I have presented PASS to several groups in the U.S. Federal
1
Brickley JA, Smith CW, Zimmerman JL. (1997). Management Fads and Organizational Architecture. Journal of
Applied Corporate Finance, 10(2) 24-39.
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government, and international colleagues who participate in an online forum
called Better Government. While PASS comes from government experiences, it is
applicable to any large organization that needs to institutionalize performance
leadership, but is constrained by the inevitable and inherited bureaucracy that
causes leaders to deliver less than they hoped for in organizational
improvement.
Performance leadership is a common organizational need. It is also relevant to
human development, especially when individuals volunteer to join a group to
cause an outcome. Its components include the individual’s commitment to
understand organizational performance, the motivation to develop skills that
align to organizational goals, and the choice to pursue performance
improvement. When we see successful organizations in sports, civics, and
business, we also see those who provide performance leadership—those with
“skin in the game.” It is not just their dedication that causes the “wins,” it is the
dedication of the organization to their performance leadership.
The goal of this paper is to look at performance leadership from the point of
employees’ inner work life, their internalized attitude and effort, and work out
towards the organizational architecture, including the purposeful design of
strategy and structure. The intention of the PASS methods is to outline a means
of measuring, testing, and experimenting with operational designs that enhance
performance, sustain capabilities, and effectively respond to internal and
external dynamics. The approach allows leaders of large, complex organizations
to manage comprehensive and reliable means of influencing the short and long-
term performance in employees and the total organization.
In addition to the applied science in PASS, this paper looks at the value of
integrating advanced media and agile technology to reinforce the development
of performance leadership as it interacts with the organizational architecture.
The benefits include distributed intelligence and operational innovation among
employees, as well as more organic rather than codified work environments. In
total, the organization moves steadily towards becoming a light enterprise and
systematically reduces the heavy bureaucracy that has limited its achievements.
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Performance Leadership
David M. Paschane, Ph.D.
Performance leadership places employees’ emerging capabilities at the center of organizational
achievement.
It is a deliberate response to the natural entropy of large organizations, where operational
complexity and the internal2 and external3 drivers of change persistently decay organizational
capabilities. The typical response to the entropy is increased bureaucratic controls; which in
turn, reduce employee-based awareness and inject “systemic organizational weaknesses by
creating subtle sabotage through the resistance of employees that believe they are powerless
in the bureaucracy that manages them.”4
The common alternative to bureaucratization5 is to adopt the latest business management fads,
despite the evidence that these are insufficient, have poor return on investment, and in some
cases produce unwanted consequences;6 including inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and perhaps
most hazardous—demoralization of employees who feel bounded to operational distortions
because of misplaced efforts by executives.
In contrast to the risks imposed by bureaucratic controls and management fads, performance
leadership development addresses the core of the organization, the employees. By maturing
performance leadership, the organization gains a distributed source of performance
management. The capabilities include distributed operational intelligence and countless touch
points on the conditions affecting total cost and performance. Because performance leadership
reinforces the permission and discretion to improve operations, employees shift their attention
to the long-term, high-rigor means of adding value, even if these are small improvements in
routine tasks. Employees no longer see themselves as a “cog-in-the-wheel,” rather they are
2
Common internal drivers of organizational change include missing expertise, emerging expertise, rule changes,
quality of work life, staff shortages, new staff, staff exodus, self-management, miss-fitted management, process
ambiguity, process choke points, and disjointed communications.
3
Common external drivers of organizational change include increased customers, customer ambivalence,
increased demands, divergent demands, product diversity, market diversity, diffused locations, miss-fitted
services, laggard services, austere budget reviews, contextual dependencies, and mission shifts.
4
Kanter, RM. (2010). Powerlessness corrupts. Harvard Business Review, July-August.
5
Paschane DM. (2003). A Theoretical Framework for the Medical Geography of Health Service Politics.
Dissertation, University of Washington.
6
Brickley JA, Smith CW, Zimmerman JL. (1997). Management Fads and Organizational Architecture. Journal of
Applied Corporate Finance, 10(2) 24-39.
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emerging leaders who have become their own best performance analysts. They know why the
work they do is efficient, effective, and causing desired outcomes. Performance leadership is its
own value multiplier. Employees become recognized experts, and as a result, want to pass the
expertise to others who share their passion for affecting, changing, and sustaining
organizational achievements.
The responsibility for developing performance leadership lies with the executive management.
This paper outlines how executives can lead an adaptive discipline for comprehensive and
reliable maturing of performance leaders, and integrate the employee-based capabilities into
the organizational architecture and strategy.
As a discipline for scientific and technological methods, Performance Architectural Science
Systems (PASS) organizes methods that develop and sustain performance leadership among
employees. PASS is comprehensive in its scope and flexible enough to fit organizations’ existing
operations. It offers many entry points for implementation, which allows organizations to
prioritize their targets for maturing most-needed capabilities.
PASS implementation has two major operations. The operation that focuses on the individual
employee developing performance leadership is the Advanced Media Program (AMP). The AMP
delivers the messages and experiences that influence both the employees’ inner work life and
their expert development. The operation that coordinates performance leadership through and
among executives and the total organization is the Performance Analytics Operation (PAO). The
PAO facilitates the analytic methods that inform the AMP design, diagnose performance
outcomes, define requirements for the organizational architecture, and organize the content in
management guidance, such as concept of operations, performance reports, and strategic
plans.
The PASS goal is to embed pervasive analytics into the operational structure. This helps prevent
the unwanted tendency of organizations ignoring conditions that affect performance, now and
in the future. By embedding analytics the organization can pursue long-term, sustainable, net-
value achievements based on employees’ emerging capabilities; rather than situational, high-
cost, short-term wins. Meanwhile, employees benefit from the cultural effects of embedded
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analytics—they work towards numerous localized achievements while developing their
personal, career-enhancing capabilities.
Advanced Media Program
The AMP is fundamental to the emergence of performance leadership. It has the responsibility
of affecting complex aspects of how employees understand their commitments, motivations,
and choices within organizational goals.
Operationally, an AMP creates, manages, and tests messages in multiple formats to affect how
employees’ think about and respond to calls to action. This is a highly valuable and efficient
means of management. It broadly distributes the outcome-oriented messages that reinforce
employee behavior, while reducing the need to increase managerial layers.
The AMP includes the use of multiple channels to deliver messages through videos, graphics,
audios, scripts, and photos that affect expectations, affinity, curiosity, commitments, and
actions in employees. The internal analyses ensure the messages are dynamically fitting the
uniqueness of employee’s interests and roles. Employees are constantly stimulated in ideas
that affect performance leadership.
An AMP is largely a training capability. The training achieves four objectives. First, employees
learn the policies of the organization for developing performance leadership. The policies
define and clarify when the organization controls structure and when employees have
discretion to lead performance discovery and improvement. Because of the nature of
performance improvement, the policies change as the organizational architecture and
performance leadership matures.
Second, employees learn the analytic skills and practices for managing their own development
of performance leadership, and have the opportunity to engage peers in a community of
emerging performance leaders who leverage on-the-job training to advance their careers.
Third, the training helps employees internalize messages—ones that they cognitively repeat to
themselves, and as a result, sustain their motivation, focus, and creativity. The internalization
affects the inner work life of employees and how they interact with each other.
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Fourth, the training prepares employees for becoming emerging leaders by focusing on how
they are achieving the vision of the organization, changing its operations, and producing better
outcomes.
Because of the online, data-driven dynamics of an AMP, the progress of individual development
can support a robust succession plan. Notable progress in performance leadership training can
be further developed with personalized coaching. The intention of the coaching-based training7
is to reinforce the emerging performance leader with an awareness of how PASS prepares
executive management, and leads to a light enterprise.
A contemporary example of light enterprise is the executive leadership of Steve Jobs (Apple
Inc.). Mr. Jobs created an environment where technology, expertise, and analytics drive a vision
of better work and coordination, and advanced media influences the strategy and structure of
organizational success. Examples such as these can be instrumental in coaching executive-level
capabilities in performance leadership. Building on such training, the AMP is responsible for
positively affecting the foundational processes in the inner work life of employees, and the
development of in-house expertise.
Inner Work Life
Organizations are collections of people—individuals who have an inner work lives. The inner
work life is a complex set of processes affecting how individuals understand themselves and
interact with others. While most of the inner work life is hidden, a great deal is revealed
through patterns in behavior, which ultimately affect work, performance, and the success of
the organization. The following diagram represents the complexity of the inner work life.
7
For an example of content that fits coaching in performance leadership, see McGoff, C. (2011). The Primes.
Victory Publishers (ISBN: 192992125X).
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The triangles represent a whole person with unique expressions, or touch points, where the
individual’s work life behaviorally impacts others.
The top triangle represents Expertise, or how one presents value to the organization. It sets
personal expectations for needs of control, esteem, and security; and, as the expertise is
defined and accepted by others, these inner processes are reinforced. If the expertise is well
aligned to the organization, control, esteem, and security are healthy, effective, and supportive
of others in the organization.
The left triangle represents Commitment to others in the organization—it aligns one’s
emotions, thinking, and stories to the collective goal. Commitment from the inner work life is
an affinity with others that is repeated to one’s self, and helps sustain the other processes.
The triangle on the right is the inner work life that manifests as Integrity. It is the effort one
makes to ensure that plans, actions, and messages lead to an outcome consistent with
promises to the organization, explicit or not.
Taken together, the expertise justifies the individual being in the organization, the commitment
aligns the individual’s dedication to the organization, and the integrity aligns the individual to
fulfilling calls to action. The inner space is not labeled—it is aspects of the individual that are
hidden from external interactions.
Meanwhile, evidence of expertise, commitment, and integrity can be observed and measured.
They are touch points that affect the organization. The inner work life is foundational to
performance leadership. It is not a one-time agreement at the time of hiring an employee; it is
continually reinforced by processes in and about the organization.
Expert Development
Central to PASS is the availability of in-house expertise through performance leadership. The
AMP is responsible for managing expert development through a focus on training employees in
the adoption of personal analytic practices that lead to sustainable operational capabilities. The
diagram below illustrates the training objectives of the AMP.
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The analytic practices include reviewing, documenting, and assessing the effectiveness of
formal transactions and informal interactions in a work environment, and monitoring signals
and discovering patterns in performance trends.
Formal transactions include work that is completed and handed off to others, work that ends so
another employee can start working on a separate component, or work that is meant to collect
and integrate the work of others. The purpose of formal interactions is to limit confusion about
work flow; however, the transactions can have unnecessary rigidity that slows performance, or
even undermines the quality of work.
The informal interactions are the role-like practices8 that employees adopt to establish and
reinforce how they work with others. These roles can become over-emphasized and ineffective
because they discourage performance leadership by limiting employees’ attention to the work
that fits their perceived role. The informal role can lessen one’s sense of responsibility for the
organizational whole, and ultimately interfere with the maturity of overall capabilities.
Fundamental to PASS is movement away from these self-limiting roles.
The AMP also reinforces the analytic practices of recognizing the signals of change in
performance, and discovering work patterns causing performance trends over time. These are
skills that can start with basic observation and analyses of irregular performance. The employee
does not necessarily need official data to recognize irregularities and explore ways of explaining
these through observed patterns in work flow or other operations. All the same, this is an area
where the employee training can be reinforced with the use of technological applications and
platforms that help monitor performance—assuming these are configured for recursive,
adaptive, learning-oriented analytic practices—a trademark of PASS.
8
Informal roles include the beggar, caller, cheerleader, consumer, counter, dealer, dictator, dispatcher,
documenter, dreamer, driller, dumper, hoarder, inventor, juggler, leader, orator, orchestrator, racer, regulator,
reviewer, sculptor, spectator, weightlifter, and writer.
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Through repetition and dynamic messaging, the four analytic practices eventually become skills
of the in-house expert. They can be specific to a technical area, or generalized to any operation.
Besides the expertise, they lead to four sustainable operational capabilities that can be long-
term strengths of any organization.
First, employees become aware of causality9 in its natural setting. This helps employees learn
analytic practices in familiar operations, and can help motivate their sense of ownership of the
outcomes they produce. Second, regular development of analytic practices can help employees
transfer knowledge to other employees. They gain a detailed knowledge of what goes into the
work and what aspects of the work are most important to understand and manage. Third,
employees define workload capacity and develop a personal interest in how they can adopt
efficient practices—they work smarter and get more out of their effort. Fourth, the value of
work is sustained because only essential inputs get used, as these deliver the most output.
These skills in analytic practices encourage employees to have a stake in understanding and
maximizing value for the organization.
The PASS methods for developing in-house experts are simple and measurable. The attention is
on impacting maturity of emerging capabilities. It is organized by operational levels and
managerial functions, as illustrated in the following table.
Managerial Functions
Operational Levels Workflow Workforce Policy Change Communication
Primary
Secondary
Tertiary
The work environment, regardless of organizational size, is a set of managerial functions that
are applied to a technical operation.
To develop in-house experts, the operations are reviewed, documented, and assessed by
employees who are assessing specific managerial functions, namely workflow, workforce,
policy, change, and communications, as applied to an operation.
9
A limitation for nearly every organization is the management of performance when causality is poorly
understood. Too often, managers assume causes of outcomes are well known, causal pathways are easily
understood once identified, and awareness of causality is sustained in useful ways once it is articulated.
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Workflow is the study of how work gets done formally or informally. Workforce is the study of
who is needed to achieve the work and how to engage them. Policy is the study of the rules
that direct the work now and in the future. Change is the study of how new actions, events, or
requirements impact the work. Communication is the study of how information is captured,
organized, disseminated, and valued internally and externally. In each case, the goal is to study
rather than establish or standardize, as the results can be documented and reused in follow-on
methods. Meanwhile, employees gain knowledge of specific managerial functions.
As illustrated in the table, expert development focuses on three operational levels: Primary,
secondary, and tertiary.
The primary level is that of the individual employee. It is what is feasible for one person, given
the limitations on available time and operational perspective. The primary level focuses on the
organization in which the individual works, or on personal work as it affects the organization. In
the latter, specialized applications10 can be used to capture trends in work performance,
including decisions, timing, dependencies, effort, readiness, and self-ratings of changes in
quality or learning. The AMP can ensure that the primary level of analytic practices is effective
for training, and not distracting employees from their regular work duties.
The secondary operational level for applying analytic practices to managerial functions is the
Method Enhancement Team (MET). The MET is a chartered, limited-duration group that has the
responsibility of studying a managerial function with the intention of preparing the organization
for routine, more formalized application of analytic practices. The MET would be required to
prepare a summary of the analyses and their contribution to the operational capabilities. The
work may result in a set of requirements for configuring and installing a continuous
improvement platform that visually represents the analytic practices based on real-time
information. A follow-on assignment may be to have the MET use the platform in recursive
analyses11, and improve its interpretation of and integration of managerial functions.
The MET provides a repeatable opportunity to train new employees in an operation, train
emerging leaders in managerial aspects of the organization, and transfer knowledge from a
more experienced employee to the group. Employees who deliver new analytic capability to the
10
An example is the use of the Technical Optimization Application in mobile devices to help technicians who
provide desk-side technology support to their colleagues in business operations. The technician uses the
application to monitor, trend, and discover their personal performance and how it compares to peers.
11
While many organizations will acquire some form of assessment to understand the inner working of a major
function, they rarely translate the findings into recursive analyses that can be readily used and modified to
maintain performance analytics. In cases where the assessment is contracted out to a third party, the requirement
should be to prepare parameters for future monitoring according to the initial assessment.
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organization through the MET12 should be recognized and awarded to encourage their
continual interest in performance leadership.
The tertiary operational level is the long-term MET, which is responsible for the governance of
performance data, development of evidence-based work plans to change operations, and the
routine communication of performance and plans in visual formats. The tertiary-level MET is
instrumental in sustaining information that affects executive levels, including the development
of platforms that have bearing on complicated decisions and negotiations.13
In each operational level, primary, secondary, and tertiary, there is an opportunity to integrate
and cross-references the analytic practices and the resulting operational capabilities. In some
cases, organizations may want to use members of METs as experts in a managerial function,
such as one person responsible for leading the study of communications across METS.
Meanwhile, the AMP reinforces messages about METs progress, and helps sustain the interest
and motivation of employees, train their analytic skills, and mature their performance
leadership. The AMP ensures that employees have the necessary “skin in the game” for
sustaining the organizations’ in-house expertise for performance capabilities.
As it relates to in-house expertise, the maturity curve for performance leadership is illustrated
below.
12
The level of effort of each employee in a MET is 5% to 10% of their full time work.
13
An example is the Green IT Model Performance Architecture (see SPARC LLC) that captured extensive energy
data from employees’ use and facility operations to provide real-time analyses of cost drivers, and easily identify
opportunities to limit costs through negotiated changes in policies and practices.
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The curve begins with employees developing awareness of functions and how they operate.
Over time and with greater participation, employees develop skills for performance monitoring,
and through the use of embedded analytics they make rapid diagnoses of performance trends
and possible forecasts.
Eventually, the employees become experts in the total cost and causality of outcomes. They
become sensitive to the net value of work so they are able to discount the perceived
achievements by the realistic estimates of unwanted consequences, such as unexpected costs
or effects. In total, the maturity of performance leadership is a highly valuable, dispersed
capability of the organization, which leads to reliable understanding of the past work, and
robust capability for creating the future organization.
The transition from expert development in employees to sustained capabilities in the
organization is a matter of design, through the organizational architecture. The following
section outlines the role of the Performance Analytics Operation in developing long-lasting
organizational capabilities.
Performance Analytics Operation
The application of Performance Architectural Science Systems (PASS) to an organization is
partly about the messaging, training, and experimenting among employees; and, partly about
the management of rigorous, organization-wide, embedded analytics in support of executive
leadership. The latter is organized under a Performance Analytics Operation (PAO). The PAO
provides executives the adaptive analytics they need to improve outcomes and organizational
capabilities by design.
The PAO can be instrumental in managing several high-priority activities, including:
1. Evaluating the effectiveness of the AMP, its training, the MET experiences, and the
continuous improvement platforms, and recommending changes to designs.
2. Defining requirements for the system integration of platforms to complete integrated
performance architectures, drawing from the discovery in model platforms.
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3. Identifying weaknesses in the organizational architecture and prescribing initiatives to
take corrective actions14 or preparing METs for developing improvement plans.
4. Coordinating methodologists and technologists who collaborate in the engineering of
agile configurations of the learning-based analytic information systems.
5. Providing evidence of employees’ needs and accomplishments that inform the
development of management guidance, such as strategic plans.
6. Explaining multi-causal conditions affecting performance by drawing from disparate
cases, or the patterns that emerge across organizations with similar program goals.
7. Organizing performance credits that attribute achievements to individuals and teams for
recognitions and awards, and for the rapid identification of in-house expertise.
8. Preparing organizations for repeatable success by identifying the patterns that have
reinforced performance leadership and have reduced risks and unnecessary costs.
These are all relevant to the organization’s capacity for performance leadership. They
characterize the opportunity executives have to shift their attention from short-term, low-rigor
surge projects to the activities that allow them to develop and sustain performance leadership
among their employees. It also highlights the need to rethink the meaning of performance
management.
Performance Management
Too often, executives think performance management is a dashboard of red, yellow, and green
signals that indicate when a project is off schedule or some other related measure. They will
even go as far as buying an expensive “solution” that promises to automate data feeds and
provide more exciting graphics for monitoring selected metrics. This is not performance
management, and it is especially not useful for developing performance leadership.
Effective performance management starts with the ability to tell an evidence-based story about
the work that is completed, active, and planned. The story needs to demonstrate accountability
with the resources previously committed, and show justification for resources requested.
14
Corrective actions can include reducing workflow friction, pauses, or requirements; redesign employees’ contact
points, roles, or training; update agreements in dependent transactions; test alternative policies for workflow
management and restrictions; and interpret how formal and informal rules affect work environments.
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An effective story will build affinity among those who are participating by illustrating the vision
for the work, and clarify the true context and circumstances in which the work is being
completed. Technology can be very helpful in telling an effective performance story. The
technology should help reveal and illustrate the story while assisting in the rigor, or scientific
methods behind the message.
The most important method is the recursive analytics, where the measures are evaluated for
how well they provide useful, testable, and diagnostic information. Did we measure the right
data at the right time for the purpose of our work? The audience needs to feel confident that
the performance leader understands the causality in the work, and is willing to adapt the work
to the realistic conditions, and manage the discovered factors affecting employees’ work and
causing outcomes.
Performance management in PASS builds on the practice of making all work components and
contexts testable by employees. The PAO supports employees’ tests by organizing methods and
technologies that help mature the analytic skills and activities. The PAO organizes the mobile
applications, continuous improvement platforms, and statistical data structures for employees
to pursue greater understanding of how their work, and tests of work, improves outcomes,
including outcomes that vary by customers’ groups and contexts.
The PAO manages the use of agile system integration and online user interactivity to optimize
the use of geographic analyses, operations research, performance analytics, customer analytics,
decision models, market research, as these are all analytic methods that explain opportunities
for employees to improve outcomes. An interesting effect of persistent analytics among
employees is that the organizational structure becomes more organic than codified—the
employees’ placement and organization is defined more by just-in-time expertise and
performance leadership, rather than bureaucratic controls, power centers, and employee-
manager loyalties.
The major components of PASS are illustrated below and summarize the integration of scientific
and technological methods.
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The performance component is largely Operations Research (OR) for discovering causes of
outcomes, including operational friction, and how these can be reused in algorithms of a model
performance architecture.
The architectural component relies on System Itegration (SI) to fit, use, and reuse recursive
analyses on emerging data. The SI requirements are largely agile configurations and
programming for leaders to learn as they operate tasks.
The science in PASS is primarily the use of visualization and contextualization of intended and
unintended causes of outcomes and their variation. These methods are described herein as
Geographical Analytics (GA), and they include spatial studies, human geography, geographic
information systems, and others.15 They are largely used to make strategic inferences about the
contextual conditions that affect outcomes. GA can provide significant insight and is especially
useful for large or multi-unit organizations because it easily allows “layered” knowledge
without full-course data sharing.
The systems component of PASS is User Interactivity (UX), where the facilitation of in-house
learning and external customer analyses facilitate behavioral commitment, cognitive
awareness, and intuitive learning. The interaction of these four components gives PASS
tremendous flexibility for refining analyses that fir the organization’s maturity of performance
leadership.
15
GA is also useful in monitoring and explaining the relationships of organizational efforts and the variability that is
in customer or constituent demography, expenditure distributions, infrastructural locations, workforce locations,
customer utilization, customer outcomes, and jurisdictional alignments.
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As performance management becomes more adaptive, analytic, and employee-centered, the
executive leadership can focus on questions that pertain to outcome complexities, such as
human behavior, organizational development, and system dynamics. Examples of these
questions are listed below and they require an organization-wide view of performance.
Human Behavior:
How are employees behaving in different circumstances and contexts?
What information triggers employees’ activities and achievements?
What behaviors do employees encouraged, allowed, or tolerate, or not?
Organizational Development:
What official or unofficial roles and rules affect teams or groups?
How are formal or informal processes sustained, changed, or overlooked?
What self-preservation or resistance to change is tolerated or challenged?
System Dynamics:
How are interdependent commitments to transactions sustained or broken?
What affects the capacity to transform or utilize information and analyses?
What drives the constructs or believes reinforcing or changing systemic patterns?
The answers to these questions help executives develop performance leaders, sustain analytic
capabilities, and design organizational architectures.
Organizational Architecture
Ideally, an Organizational Architecture (OA) is an intentional design that reinforces performance
capabilities, has measurable components, and is adaptable to changing requirements. An OA is
the structure and practice that organize work among groups of employees and their
interactions with external groups. Too often the OA is the result of many ad hoc decisions.
Because of the lack of broad-view design, these decisions create practices, policies, and rules of
behavior that tend to be laden with inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, and unnecessary friction or
constraints. The common, pejorative term for this state of OA is “bureaucratic,” where the
emphasis is on codified rules and structures to create order with little regard of their effect on
the needs of the organization to adapt to internal and external changes. In contrast, an OA can
be designed to amplify performance leadership. The design may contain the same reporting
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hierarchies and orderly grouping of work that are characteristic of the bureaucratic model, but
their effectiveness is by design rather than convention.
The continuous redesign of the OA is a major responsibility of the executive, supported by the
analytic work of the PAO, where the goal is to rethink the opportunities to shift knowledge,
information, and discretion to the employees for better performance leadership. As noted
recently, “many of the traditional bureaucratic approaches to management need to be
discarded,”16 so we can understand the OA and design it for the development of performance
leadership.
To be useful to employees, the OA components must be understandable and lend themselves
to routine measurement. Herein, I use two metaphors to define and communicate the OA and
its interrelationships with employees, functions, and structures of the organization.
The two metaphors are a Driver and a Car. The Driver components of OA represent the
employee (or contractor) relationships to the organization, and they affect the inner work life
described above. The Car components characterize the structural functions of the organization.
In the Driver metaphor, I assume that the individual is a potential performance leader. The
relationship with the organization is based on specific agreements that affect the metaphorical
Heart, Mind, and Body of the Driver.
The agreements vary by the experience of the Driver, and these are illustrated below in three
levels. The first level is the novice Driver (earl-career), followed by the advanced Driver (mid-
management), and then the expert Driver (executive). The diagram below illustrates the first
metaphor as it relates to employee experience.
16
Lawler E. (2011). Designing High Performance Organizations, Working Paper, University of Southern California.
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First, the Heart of the Driver is where the individual makes a connection to the Car because of
its unique experience and the continual reinforcement of the driving experience. The Heart
represents the agreement the individual has with the organization, in terms of the discretion to
learn, plan, and change the work environment—to “own” it. The discretion-control policy of the
organization defines the scope of these agreements and how they change over the course of
the employee’s development and the maturity of organizational capabilities.
In the novice Driver, this is the individual discovery of what can be improved and how the
organization allows for such improvements. For the advanced Driver, the agreements are based
on the chartered teams (i.e., METs) and their approved role in identifying opportunities to
improve work conditions. The expert Driver draws from the other levels to deliver the strategic
plan, a composite of opportunities to improve the work environment and achieve
organizational goals. Each level has an experiential (Heart) connection to the organization
because of agreements define discretion for creating the future organization.
Second, the metaphorical Mind of the Driver is where the individual requires stimulating
feedback from the Car, as a means of understanding the road and the required handling of the
Car. The metaphor represents the interactions of the individual employee with performance
information. As noted earlier, the individual Driver can learn from the performance
architecture, as it is organized to deliver primary analytics (e.g., self-evaluation), secondary
analytics (e.g., operational evaluation), or tertiary analytics (e.g., organizational evaluation).
Just as a Driver’s road experience advances from novice, to advanced, to expert, the required
information changes in levels of the performance leader.
Third, the metaphorical Body of the Driver must feel secure and relatively comfortable in the
Car. If the Body is not well supported, the Driver is distracted and unable to concentrate on
driving the Car. The metaphor represents the promotion conditions that affect the employee, in
terms of meeting needs and expectations of reward for commitment to performance
leadership.
The novice Driver, or earl-career employee is a manager of a portfolio of personal
achievements, including the participation in primary level analyses of operations. The portfolio
evaluation is the basis of reward because it represents a commitment to developing
performance leadership, and the work conditions that the individual has affected. The portfolio
documents and characterizes the emerging expertise, and reward is based on the improved
value of the individual to the organization.
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The advanced Driver, or mid-level manager is evaluated by performance achievement credits.
The credits are based on teams’ achievements, measured in standard period increments, and
weighted by standard impact roles. The achievements follow the portfolio structure in that they
include categories of how analytic work has created new offerings, new capabilities, and
capability improvements. The credits establish evidence for promotions and identify expertise
for cross-organizational planning of teams to achieve common goals.
The expert Driver, or executive-level manager, is evaluated by capability impacts. These are
changes in the capabilities developed in the organization. They represent how well the
executive has matured the intersection of analytic and performance capabilities in the
employees and their teams.
Overall, the Driver metaphor provides definition of the OA in terms of the employees at
different levels of experience and responsibility, as they have discretion through agreements
(Heart), interactions with performance analyses (Mind), and evaluated for promotions or
rewards (Body). The PAO is responsible for regular reviews of the Employee-Organization
components of the OA, and how these affect performance leadership.
The OA also includes the Structure-Organization components. This metaphor is the Car. The Car
includes the Engine, Interior, and Chassis, which corresponds to technical operations, customer
engagement, and managerial functions, respectively.
In the Car metaphor, the Engine is where value is dependent on the repetition of operations.
The Engine must be fine-tuned and maintained. Just like the Engine, the core technical
operations of the organization drive value. The core operations require close observation to
improve the total, metaphorical machinery. The recursive analyses diagnose what conditions
affect a high-speed, low-drag configuration of human effort and technological automation.
Likewise, comparative analyses are used to understand technical operations; as they compare
an alternative model or an idealized, de-contextualized model. These models help illustrate
which improvements are possible if the technical operations are separated from the friction
currently in the organizational structure. The comparative analyses tests for future
configurations of operations with greater optimization. The performance leaders’ work in
technical operations (Engine) tends to produce or rely on experts in engineering and
mechanical skills. These are employees who enjoy opportunities to mature the precision and
optimization of the core operations.
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The second element in the Car metaphor is the Interior, which is the lasting image and
experience of the Car—it is the aesthetics that keeps the Driver engaged and attentive to the
details of the experience. The Interior represents customers’ engagement with the
organization.
Employees create the engagement, monitor it, experience it, and redesign the experience so
that it has the desired effects. An organization has internal and external customers, and all of
these experience the engagement through the design of messages, symbols, and
communication dynamics.
The customer engagement cannot assume one-size-fits-all, rather it should use persona
analytics to define individual interests and customer groups for effective impacts. The
messaging of the AMP, discussed above is relevant to how performance leadership affects
customer engagements; especially those are designed for internal customers. The emerging
experts in customer engagement are creative, entrepreneurial, and passionate about
responding to others. They analyze the variations in the market of customers, and identify ways
that the experience can be adjusted for different contexts.
Lastly, the Car includes the Chassis, which metaphorically holds the Engine and Interior
together. The Chassis supports the Car and sets parameters on what is possible in the
performance of the Car. Likewise, the organization has managerial functions that are much like
the Car’s Chassis.
The managerial functions were discussed above in the training of performance leaders. They
include the workflow, workforce, policy, change, and communication of the organization. They
are the formal and informal rules that govern transactions between employees and
organizational units. Like the Car, the Chassis can be changed by unforeseen events.
The goal of performance leadership is to put continuous attention on the managerial functions;
especially, as these facilitate the development of high-performance teams and desired
outcomes. The experts in managerial functions are the organizers and orchestrators, those who
see opportunities for recreating how employees work together to achieve common goals. Their
attention is on the “pressure points” in pivotal aspects of work, as they monitor transactions
and their value throughout the organization.
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Employee-Organization OA
Structure-Organization OA Discretion-Control Performance Architecture Promotion Conditions
Technical Operations EC-MM-EX / Expertise EC-MM-EX / Expertise EC-MM-EX / Expertise
Customer Engagement EC-MM-EX / Expertise EC-MM-EX / Expertise EC-MM-EX / Expertise
Managerial Functions EC-MM-EX / Expertise EC-MM-EX / Expertise EC-MM-EX / Expertise
The table above summarizes the six components of the Employee-Organization and Structure-
Organization of OA. Through this format the components are examined as they affect or are
affected by the employees, given their changing level of experience (early career [EC], mid-
management [MM], and executive [EX]) and emerging expertise.
The OA is dynamic, yet the PASS methods make the applied analytics effective and useful for
developing performance leadership. These components are central to performance
management because they affect individuals’ performance. If they are ignored, organizations
suffer from the systemic weaknesses that ad hoc decisions impose on employees and their
possible achievements.
Agile Technology
Emerging technologies have made it easier for organizations to manage performance while
developing performance leaders. Agile technologies are especially important in the application
of PASS to an organization, as it allows for analytic discovery and testing.
In order for the PAO to apply scientific methods to the dynamic activities of the AMP and the
comprehensive components of OA, agile technologies need to include the mobile devices,
online experience, and information configurations that are quickly adapted to the improvement
and strategic needs of employees. The role of agile technology is to configure performance
architectures that simplify the complexity, organize the variability, and personalize the utility in
information affecting performance leadership.
Technology leaders can make the mistake of delivering technology according to fads in the
market. Instead, they should focus on performance architecture, and how employees become
performance leaders.17
17
Sauer and Willcocks note problems for technologists include understanding the linkages between particular
technologies and their organizational implications, making the right trade-offs between competing organizational
potentialities, and retaining and developing the organizational potential of the technology over time. See Sauer C.,
Willcocks L. (2003). Establishing the Business of the Future: The Role of Organizational Architecture and
Information Technologies. European Management Journal, 21 (4), 497-508.
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One relevant technology strategy is the convergence of communications that operate on
different devices and systems so that employees have convenient and quick interactions
without interference or distractions in their work.
Another strategy is to offer every employee the ability to register, store, and share their
portfolios and performance achievement credits, and their active PASS efforts while using
mobile and virtual devices. Such a technology configuration is ideal for the light enterprise that
encourages employees to focus their efforts on affecting the organization’s mission rather than
simply being under supervision for an eight-hour-day. Technologists can organize performance
analytics as a remote technology service, so that individuals, teams, and executives can easily
leverage the capabilities of digital visualization,18 monitoring and forecasting, standardize
reporting,19 and other analytic work functions in the physical places where they are most
effective at their work. The future of work will not be a lengthy policy guiding employees’
behavior; rather, it will be pushing out a mobile application asking for employees to test its
utility in creating a better organization.
Contemporary, popular technologies, such as social (e.g., Facebook) and consumer (e.g.,
Amazon) media, offer highly intuitive, insightful, and responsive systems. Meanwhile,
organizations tolerate difficult and time consuming systems that reinforce their own
bureaucracy. The PASS approach to technology is to test emerging functionality in agile, limited
configurations where employees can fit the technology to the organization’s emerging
performance leadership. The tests help ensure that the focus is on the value of the
performance analytics, rather than the growth of technology systems.
Management Guidance
The sustainability of performance leadership is partly due to the ways in which PASS supports
the development of management guidance, including Concepts of Operations (CONOPS),
Performance Reports, and Strategic Plans. The PASS methods generate significant evidence-
18
Visualization through information maps is a highly valued capability in managing the strategy of teams and
organizations. The digital versions can capture a complex story about objectives and goals while keeping the
viewer engaged in the overall process (see Maga Design). The map configuration can store a variety of key artifacts
behind icons, including budget execution, workflows, teaming, target descriptions, use case, white papers, work
plans, and other relevant information. The one-page map of a plan can help limit misunderstanding among teams
and keep all participants focused on the causality of performance.
19
The U.S. Federal government is testing an example of standardized reporting that will allow each agency to
provide performance data to structured reports for searching and downloading stored data that is managed by the
respective agencies.
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based content for these deliverables, discovered through routine analyses and employees’
participation.
The PASS methods help individuals and teams integrate their work plans into the CONOPS for
training their peers, modify performance achievements, and define the possible initiatives for
improved performance and performance capability. The integration of PASS helps leaders
manage complexity and develop the most effective management guidance.20 The graphic below
illustrates a six-stage cycle in the application of PASS to such deliverables.
The cycle starts at the top of the diagram with the definition of the organization; specifically,
the attributes outlined herein; from employees’ inner work life to components of the
organizational architecture. The definitions provide a current awareness of the capabilities of
the organization.
The cycle continues with testing of analytic models. These are the embedded analyses, based
on employees’ distributed performance intelligence. The models include the emerging
Continuous Improvement Platforms developed by METs and the Model Performance
Architectures developed by the PAO.
At this early stage in the cycle the organization is organic and allows for flexibility in teaming
and testing of expertise and capabilities. The likely performance measures are relatively simple.
They include temporal, contextual, causal, economical, operational, and cultural conditions
affecting performance. The throughputs are measured for their volume, quality, fit, and
20
See related themes in Martin R. (2007). How Successful Leaders Think. Harvard Business Review, June.
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timeliness. Friction in transactions is graded for their effects, and trending data is normalized to
describe the first and second thresholds that indicated inconsistencies in performance.
Next, the cycle includes testing the contextual fit of models. This includes the tests of how the
markets of customers or constituents are affected differently because of contextual conditions.
It also includes the fit of models to the context of organizational units, given their interactions
and transactions with other units. The employees learn how performance in the components of
the OA are contingent on the context they are applied. This stage is where much of the risk of
projects is identified and resolved with minimal investment. The teams learn the factors that
will affect future work.
The cycle then produces work plans defined by the METs, in cooperation with the executives
and the PAO. The work plans outline the evidence developed in support of changes to the
organization, based on the tested models and their fit to various contexts. This midpoint in the
cycle is when individual discretion decreases and the organization beings controlling the new
OA for purposes of managing changes. This stage includes updating the CONOPS based on the
results of the work plans.
Next, the cycle includes testing of improvement effects. The PAO examines the effects of all
previous tests and those of the changes prescribed in the work plans. As the work plans are
executed, they provide significant insight into the conditions that affect the organizational
outcomes, and they illustrate to employees the achievements of their performance leadership.
This stage produces much of the content that goes into the Performance Reports.
Lastly, the cycle defines the future state of the organization. The purpose of the stage is to
forecast the capability that will emerge from on-going and planned initiatives, and how these
will change the capabilities of the organization and its employees. This stage corresponds with
the Strategic Plan and its updates, and is appropriate for producing visualized information maps
of the past and future work, and how it affects performance.
As illustrated by the arrow, the application of PASS continues the cycle. The methodology can
be tailored to fit an annual schedule, or it may be used in faster cycles within a year, such as
every quarter or month. Taken together, the PASS application cycle provides executives a
simple, sustainable, and systematic means of using evidence-based strategies that offer a
reliable and feasible set of actions for the future.
Too often executives will describe a new initiative for their organization as something in the
“early stages,” but in truth, there is no such thing. Once an initiative is defined for an
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organization, it is part of a continuous analytic process, as shown above. The initiative is best
described as to how it fits the process of maturing an organization—it is a test of what is
possible, given the current understanding of the organization’s capability.
Future Studies
Governments are often criticized for their bureaucratic designs and effects. In response, several
nations have launched plans to enhance government productivity, increase accountability, and
improve outcomes.21 These government methods warrant further study, and examination of
their effects on performance leadership. Cross-agency government programs are complicated
by their entrenched systems and respective organizational designs; nevertheless, the
application of PASS can provide leaders an opportunity to mature operations with insight into
the causality of outcomes.
A case in point is the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act of 2010 (P.L.
111-352),22 which will require all U.S. Federal programs to report their performance to a
common database for cross-agency analytics. This development and application of performance
management will require significant analyses on the effects of these practices on performance
leadership and potential capabilities within agencies.
PASS is a multi-scalar discipline based on the theory that executives decide the levels at which
bureaucratic effects, organizational designs, and performance leadership are developed and
applied to the dependencies organizations have on internal behavior and external systems.
Because PASS methods are highly integrated they are well suited for complex, systemic issues
where solutions may require facilitated cooperation between business, government, and
academic leaders. Recent global events highlight the needs for a PASS approach to performance
management in government, including the growing interest in Effective Education to reduce
unemployment, Emergency Preparedness for unpredictable events, and Foreclosure Prevention
in housing markets.
There are many other examples of where PASS would be instrumental in supporting recursive
analyses on complex, systemic conditions affecting disparate operations in government. One
example is the management of Patient Agency in emerging Healthcare Infrastructures; while
assumed to be simple, these are complex human systems that have dynamic effects on patient
outcomes, and can benefit from reliable and visible performance architectures. Because Patient
21
Kettle DF. (2000). The Global Public Management Revolution: A Report on the Transformation of Governance.
Brookings Institution Press.
22
See an analysis by the Government Accountability Office at http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-466T.
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Agency and Healthcare Infrastructures affect each other they require the use of recursive
analytics to ensure both are optimized to have positive effects on disparate systems.
Another example is the growth of Remote Workforces and Workforce Transitions. Both require
a means of facilitating the maturity of performance leadership and the use of dynamic
information platforms. In remote workforces the need is to sustain the value of work that is not
immediately supervised by managers. In workforce transitions, such as separating military
veterans, the need is to define work value in terms of the business operations of potential
future employers. The systems that support Remote Workforces can also become the
information platforms that support successful Workforce Transitions.
A common need for PASS is where organizations manage operational inputs, such as Energy
Conservation.
An example at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is a performance architecture that
includes robust algorithms for consequences of individual and situational energy consumption
and policy. The comprehensive monitoring of energy use, policy and scenario data per facility
supports simplified representation of trending cost curves and other signals that communicate
real-time and future results of behavior and policy change. The projected cost savings is 40% of
energy cost associated with computer systems and 20% savings associated with building
management.
Performance architectures can be applied to other inputs, such as office space, vehicles, and
equipment.
Internationally, governments have an interest in studying policies that affect aging populations,
and the opportunity to promote Vigorous Aging. Every ten years the U.S. Federal government
works with local governments, non-profits, businesses, and international delegates to examine
the emerging trends in services and policies that affect aging and the associated affects on
health and life outcomes—an international event called the White House Conference on Aging.
The next Conference23 is an opportunity to apply PASS to disparate programmatic efforts and
establish a baseline understanding of the causes of outcomes. The baseline would provide the
Nation a means of analyzing proposed aging policies and programs. Previous Conferences were
unable to establish a sustainable performance architecture that would make the information
useful across disparate contexts and organizations.
23
The next White House Conference on Aging will likely begin planning in 2012.
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The most likely place for any organization to begin its concentration of performance leadership
is in its own Technology Services. Because PASS integrates analytic disciplines and applies them
through agile technologies, it is beneficial to the organization if the Chief Information Officer
and Chief Performance Officer work together in the application of PASS. The employees who
support Technology Services can be early adopters and manage a mix of routine and testable
devices and systems. The organization can rely on the technicians to optimize services among
disparate customers and within complex management functions. As the technologists become
accustomed to PASS methods, they also lead the management of agile approaches to analytic
operations.
Conclusions
The application of PASS makes visible the numerous interdependent working relationships in
organizations, and the need for coordination of resources, policies, individual development,
technology, and means of understanding customers’ contexts. The ultimate goal is to create a
light enterprise, one that matures performance leadership in all its employees. In turn, the
employees improve the performance of the organization. In contrast, a thick bureaucracy24 is
one that creates friction and inflexibility, and feeds systemic problems of under-motivated and
underutilized employees, waste, inefficiency, and general tolerance of ineffectiveness.
Executives not only guide OA designs, they lead employees in the use to analytics, and
demonstrate how analytics help the organization achieve goals. The PASS discipline also
sustains capabilities when organizations experience frequent turn-over of executives. The wide-
spread participation of employees prepares executives to apply a “zoom framework,” where
they can gain a broader, deeper awareness of how the context affects the organization.25
Meanwhile, the employees benefit from the “information, power, knowledge, and rewards
that…are pushed down so that they are spread throughout the organization.” 26 I suggest that
the most important work of an executive is to improve the organization’s performance
leadership capability. It is a legacy that does not diminish after leaving the organization—it is an
investment in the employees and their analytic skills.
The future of performance leadership is in the ability of disparate people to collaborate in the
achievement of goals regardless of their experience, employment, or expertise. Performance
24
The “thick bureaucracy” reference is to the unwanted effects of bureaucratic models, such as when the structure
is dehumanizing, conflicts with the organizations’ mission, or impedes progress. See Riggio, RE. (2010). When
Bureaucracy Kills Leadership and Your Organization. www.pshaychologytoday.com.
25
Kanter RM. (2011). Zoom In, Zoom Out. Harvard Business Review, March.
26
Lawler E. (2011). Designing High Performance Organizations, Working Paper, University of Southern California.
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leaders will lead change where the evidence demonstrates its need and transformations where
creative thinking makes a sustainable difference.
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