Chapter One – The Sustainable Performance Dilemma

“Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.” Winston Churchill

When I was young my goal was to become the world’s greatest golfer. In the summer time my father would take me very early every morning to a small nine hole golf course in Windsor, New York. I would stand out on the far side of Route 79 from where the first hole was situated and hit golf balls to the other side of the road. It was not uncommon for me to hit 200 golf balls before nine in the morning. Then I would practice putting and chipping for an hour before heading out to play nine holes. In the afternoon I would repeat the entire cycle.

I had been taught if you want to get better you had to practice long and hard. There was no big secret to it. The harder you practiced the better your chance for success. That was what I was taught, and that was what I believed then. Today I no longer believe it, and if I knew then what I know now about high value performance improvements I believe I would have had a much better chance of achieving my goal.

What Is Practice?

We all know what practice is, or at least we think we do. It’s what athletes and musicians do. Right? In the book “Talent is Overrated”[17] the author, Geoff Colvin, describes what practice used to mean to him as follows: “When I practice golf, I go to the driving range and get two big buckets of balls. I pick my spot, put down my bag of clubs, and tip over one of the buckets. I read somewhere that you should warm up with short irons, so I take out an 8 or 9 iron and start hitting. I also read somewhere that you should always have a target, so I pick one of the “fake” greens out on the range and aim for it, though I am not really sure how far away it is. As I work through the short irons, middle irons, long irons, and driver, I hit quite a few bad shots. My usual reaction is to hit another ball as quickly as possible in hopes that it will be a decent shot, and then I can forget about the bad one. Occasionally I realize that I should stop to think about why the shot was bad. There seems to be about five thousand things you can do wrong when hitting a golf ball, so I pick one of them and work on it a bit, convincing myself that I can sense improvement, until I hit another bad one, at which point I figure I should probably also work on another one of the five thousand things. Not long thereafter the two buckets of balls are gone and I head back to the clubhouse, very much looking forward to playing an actual game of golf, and feeling virtuous for having practiced. But in truth I have no justification for feeling virtuous. Whatever it was I was doing out on the range, and regardless of whether I call it practice, it hasn’t accomplished a thing.”⁶

Does this sound like what you think practice is? Colvin discusses how great performers such as Jerry Rice, and Bill Gates achieved greatness by practicing in a different way that he calls “deliberate” practice. Deliberate practice has the following characteristics:

• It is designed specifically to improve performance
• It can be repeated a lot
• Feedback is continuously available
• It is highly demanding mentally
• It isn’t much fun

When I read those characteristics I wasn’t surprised. They sound more like what I was brought up to believe about practice than what Colvin had described his view of practice had been. I was taught you had to dedicate yourself to your practice. You had to totally commit yourself to your practice everyday giving it everything you had from sunrise to sunset. And you needed to keep doing it even when your body wanted to stop. That is what I believed and that is what I did, but it didn’t work for me. It wasn’t enough to sustain my continued performance improvement. Besides failing to achieve my performance goals, when I was about twenty years old I stopped playing golf altogether and I didn’t play the game again for almost thirty years.

Looking Back At Yesterday And At Business Today

I believe there were many factors involved in why my hard work didn’t lead to achieving my golf goal. When I would spend long days practicing I frequently became tired in the late afternoon and found it difficult to keep my mind on what I was doing. But since I was taught that practice isn’t suppose to always be fun I would keep hitting balls. Often as a result my golf swing would actually degrade and by the end of the day I would be hitting the ball worse than when I started early that morning. I felt like I was on a yo-yo, seeing improvement for a period, followed by loss of improvement. While progress was clearly evident in my early years, over time I reached a point where it seemed that the more I practiced the less value I was getting out of it and the more frustrated I became.

Today in business I see similarities to this cycle where organizations improve to a certain level and then hit a downward period even though they might still be working hard at trying to get better [9]. There are usually multiple factors involved as to why this pattern occurs, but my observation in many organizations is that sustainable improvement beyond a fundamental capability is not implemented effectively and therefore is rarely achieved. I find this to be true even in CMMI Level 5 organizations which are supposedly continuously improving their processes and hopefully demonstrating valuable performance improvements as a result [21]. While it is natural to expect a degree of up and down cycles, I believe the impact of the downward cycle in many organizations is far greater than what many may realize.

You Can’t Sustain Performance Staying Where You Are

One of the most common misunderstandings about performance relates to what it takes to maintain a specific performance level. You can’t sustain your current performance by doing nothing about improvement. This is not well understood. Without working improvements you will lose ground. This is because the environment in which you operate never stays the same. Personnel may come and go. Projects end, others start. With the passage of time, if nothing else changes people forget things they use to know.

The specific factors that cause loss of capability will differ in each organization, but loss always occurs and it is almost always more costly than many realize. An observation I made both with organizations and individuals with respect to loss of capability is that over time there are performance patterns that tend to repeat. Once you understand these repeating patterns for a given organization, or individual, you can start to predict what lies ahead. More importantly to our purpose here, you can also learn how to change the pattern so your losses are mitigated and offset by improvements that allow you to continually sustain higher performance in the future.

Most people understand that process improvement and training are important. But many don’t understand how effective sustainable performance is developed and maintained in an organization. Where this becomes most evident is in the decisions made when the business is in one of its normal down cycles showing signs of trouble. For example, when sales are slipping, or when projects are behind schedule. It is often under these conditions where the benefits of your most recent process improvement efforts could potentially be realized and be of most help to you. But this is what is most often missed. This is because many don’t understand how high value sustainable performance improvements are attained and nurtured.

If you look at the athletes who most often achieve success you will find they are the ones who are best prepared because they trained in conditions similar to (or more difficult than) those in which they must perform during competition. The best athletes seek out the most difficult conditions in which to practice and improve their performance. Runners who practice in cool weather wither on race day when the temperature turns hot. West Coast professional baseball teams rarely perform well when they head East for the World Series in cold October. Successful performers seek out adverse conditions in which to practice because they know these conditions provide the optimum environment to prepare to perform at their best.

But unfortunately rather than greet the difficult conditions when they arrive in business as an opportunity to help personnel learn to perform at their best, we find more often these are the conditions under which investments in people most often dry up. There are, of course, reasons why this happens. For example, an organization’s motivation to improve performance may change over time because of changing business conditions. But should changing business conditions cause us to lose our motivation to improve, or just refocus us on the high value areas given the current environment? This will be discussed further, along with what you can do to sustain your motivation, as we move forward in the book.

Patterns During Difficult Times

I observe repeating patterns in each organization I am asked to help. Faced with a crisis, in some organizations project management becomes engaged driving a solution. One pattern I have commonly seen, however, is for management to become overly engaged in the solution resulting in a lack of leadership and guidance deep in the organization during the crisis.

In other organizations engineering takes the reigns in times of trouble driving a solution from the technical side. A common pattern I have learned to be on the look out for in strong engineering organizations has been a loss of cost and schedule accountability during these times of high technical focus.

During times of crisis organizations that have recently instituted improvements to solve common weaknesses often revert to old habits leading to loss of performance—rather than looking to the crisis as an opportunity to apply the new behavior to gain high value performance benefits.

The manner in which process improvement is viewed and managed in most organizations today supports this backward mentality. This is because of the way process improvements are most often implemented today as distinct and segregated efforts from real projects. This makes them easy targets for elimination in these situations where they could potentially provide their greatest benefit. But when such decisions are made do we understand the consequences not just to potential future improvements, but to those investments previously made and to our current on-going critical projects?

Observing these common patterns has led me to ask questions related to what effective sustainable performance requires, and this investigation has led back to the notion of practice–but not the kind of practice I learned in my youth, nor the kind attributed to the success of our superstars, like Gates or Rice.

The View of Practice in Many Organizations Today

When we think of someone needing to practice a subconscious thought many of us have is the need to practice implies a lack of competency. For athletes or musicians practice does not bring this negative connotation. We accept that getting better for them is a noble goal. We understand you can always get better as a musician, or an athlete and if you don’t practice we know you won’t perform as well as you could during the next game or performance.

But why do we take a different view when it comes to people in the business world? This same idea of needing to practice to ensure you are ready to do your best on the next project, or the next phase of the current project, or even the next day of the current project doesn’t usually sit so well with the way we think. In fact, in business the idea of practice takes on more of a negative connotation. Rather than look upon practice as something that improves performance in the business world we tend to think that if someone needs to practice then:

”I don’t want them doing it on my project because I want someone who already knows how to do the job”.

The thinking for some reason in business becomes either you are qualified to do the job, or you are unqualified. We don’t tend to think in terms of always being able to perform at one’s best by practicing in the context of work. But why should there be any difference?

In fact in business practicing on the job is likely to be discouraged because it may mean if you are trying to do it better tomorrow you are risking doing it right today. We don’t want to take that risk. This has historically been one of the prime reasons why deploying process improvements in the business world is often resisted. While our top athletes and musicians are constantly working to get better even right up to a few moments before a big game or performance, in business we avoid change fearing loss of performance rather than recognizing the great potential opportunity it could bring.

One of the arguments I often hear is that we send people to training so they shouldn’t need to practice on the job. But this line of reasoning assumes that the purpose of training and practice are one and the same. This misses a fundamental value of practice that training does not provide.

Fundamental One: Training is about helping people understand expectations related to a job. Practice helps you actually do your job, and learn to repeat how you do it, and continue to do it well even under difficult and often unanticipated conditions.

Practice under adverse conditions is required to help us learn to do a job in the environment we will actually have to face when performing that job. Today in business because practicing “on-the-job” is discouraged we often don’t get to practice at all for the real world conditions we are asked to operate in. As a result—like the runner who practices in cool weather and then must face sweltering heat on race day– we are not prepared and time and time again fall short in sustaining our most valuable potential performance improvements when they could help us the most.

Starting To Discover A Different Kind of Practice

When I first began to think about a better way to conduct performance improvement efforts, and if it might tie to practice, I was working with a successful growing organization helping them deploy formal training of some recently improved processes. While they liked the formal training there always seemed to be people who missed the scheduled training because it was only offered at certain times. We also received feedback that while the training was good, there were frequently issues on projects that people didn’t know how to handle. These were often very specific issues such as when and how a certain type of risk should be raised to senior management, or how to handle a specific subcontractor issue, or a specific customer issue.

Often the answer to these specific issues being raised was actually in the training material, but it required an interpretation on how to apply a fundamental practice [22] ⁷ we had previously taught to a very specific situation. This was something we found many people required additional help doing.

Sustainment Training

Because these situations were arising frequently one of the managers suggested that we consider holding shorter, less formal, and more frequent sessions that came to be called Sustainment Training sessions. The idea of sustainment training wasn’t that it provided new training, but it was refresher training for just key issues that were reoccurring where people needed reminders, and could get specific questions answered. They needed help, and in some cases they needed specific guidance on scenarios that were specific to their projects. These sustainment training sessions I came to view more like “practice” than formal training.

We were repeating principles and practices that we had already taught, but we were going much deeper into “how-to” apply the principles and practices by looking at actual scenarios that were occurring on real projects and then considering different options and consequences to handle each.

These sustainment training sessions proved to be extremely popular in helping people deal with the actual situations that were arising on their project. The sustainment training we implemented had some similarities to Colvin’s “deliberate practice” and some distinct differences. Sustainment training was similar to “deliberate practice” in that:

• It was designed specifically to improve performance by taking into consideration the real situations people were facing everyday specific to their projects
• It can be repeated a lot and we found it needed to be repeated a lot because without repeating it, it became too easy for people to forget or just not to see the connection between the practice scenario and their real project situation
• Feedback was continuously available because we started holding these sessions more and more frequently opening them up for anyone to just stop by during their lunch break to get some quick feedback, and reinforcement

Sustainment practice was also different from “deliberate practice” in that:

• It didn’t take long and therefore wasn’t demanding from a time perspective
• It was fun, because we made it fun. It became a period for sharing across groups which improved morale in the company.

More and more people just started bringing their lunch and attending to listen even if they didn’t have questions. They looked forward to these mid-day sharing experiences.

When I think back to my youth, I thought I was practicing the right way to get better at golf. But my practice wasn’t effective and it didn’t feel right. I knew there must be a better way to get better, but I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know how to go about finding it.

Chapter One Summary Key Points

• You can’t sustain your current performance by doing nothing about improvement.
• Training is about helping people understand how to do a job.
• Practice helps you apply that training, and continue to apply it even under stressful conditions.
• Helping people handle the different real situations that arise on the job is itself a process improvement. It is also one of the best ways to provide high value assistance to performers on the job.
• CMMI Level 3 means you have a base from which you can start serious performance improvement efforts. Too few organizations actually understand and do this.
• Deliberate practice characteristics
  • It is designed specifically to improve performance
  • It can be repeated a lot
  • Feedback is continuously available
  • It is highly demanding mentally
  • It isn’t much fun
• Sustainment training similarities to deliberate practice
  • Designed specifically to improve performance
  • It can be repeated a lot
  • Feedback is continuously available
• Sustainment training differences from deliberate practice
  • It doesn’t take long
  • It is fun