Human Performance Management

This page is under development

A few years ago an idea formed in the context of trying to help more founders and executives create better, healthier, high performing cultures in their businesses: could you "open-source" culture? (using the term loosely here)

Well, it should be immediately obvious you could open source something: principles, standard operating procedures, corporate governance, etc. There are two problems though:

• The culture I care to put forth is necessarily light on procedure and codified documentation (more on this below)
• Even if that weren't the case, culture is what you do, not what you say (and many bad or underperforming cultures are the result of unspoken — let alone unresolved — conflict between actions and words).

In other words, how do you open source org culture if it's largely (maybe entirely) a function of actions taken?

I don't think you can.

Which leads me to Human Performance Management (working title, which I hate). This is an exercise in futility on one part, and an attempt at commercialization (or in some cases "giving back") on the other.

The futility is in attempting to codify something that is inherently resistant to such an act: good culture is resilient, great culture is antifragile. Too narrow an articulation and you've created something brittle, too broad and it ceases to provide practical guidance. This part of the website will continue to grow, attempting to walk that line, and provide the most benefit by doing the least.

Where commercialization comes in is what follows. At some point I may paywall parts of this site subsection, or attach it to a paid Substack where I focus writing on business and startup guidance. TBD. What is certainly the case is I have developed a good track record of providing outsize value for a fair price to help organizations fix their cultural problems, or at least better manage them. Many times these dysfunctions manifest in execution issues that are mistaken as 'domain' problems instead of cultural problems. If you are an organization and think, for example, "gosh X could be going much better/faster/less disruptively" — you may think you have an X problem but you probably have a culture problem, and you can contact me here to learn how I can help you solve both.

Businesses with which I worked in the past haven't always known they were paying me for culture work, nor have I always even been aware that's the service I was providing. In hindsight that's clear. Which brings us to some definitions.

Org Culture

Culture inside an organization is how things happen, and the "why" that necessarily underpins such activity.

Contrary to a common belief, it is not merely the shared set of values and beliefs inside an organization that drive action and success. This is not the case for the very simple and obvious reason that values and beliefs are often not shared across an organization, success is not always achieved, and it speaks not at all to the failures and misadventures of a team, org, or business at large.

A company may say they have a high autonomy culture, but in practice individuals rarely take action without significant broad consensus building amongst peers and superiors.

Dysfunctional Culture

There's no inherent 'right' or 'wrong' culture for an organization. Understanding the interplay between how and why things happen does not moralize either. (I would argue there are mismatches between an org culture and the external context that org finds themselves in, like a high risk, high velocity culture operating in, say, mental health services. That's a topic for later.)

Cultural dysfunction is instead a result of a clash amongst practically how things happen, the implied why (values and beliefs) driving those actions, and the explicitly stated why(s) an organization wishes to motivate those actions.

More to come

As this section evolves and grows I'll be documenting and sharing more about how to develop a healthy, high-performance culture (and how those things are defined in the first place). If you want to collaborate or learn more, reach out.