The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life

I picked up this book because it was listed in a recommended book list from a personal development seminar I recently did called Direct Access.There are some similarities between what I learned in the seminar and what I am learning from reading this book (I'm about halfway through the book now). The Direct Access seminar identified that action is correlated to how things occur to people, and the first law of performance is that how people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.If you think about it, this is a radical notion. Our society is conditioned to look for some kind of psychological assessment for why people do what they do (an "internal to external" explanation for why people do what they do). Looking from the perspective that people's action is correlated to how things occur to them is more of an "external to internal" explanation for why people do what they do. In other words, if something occurs a particular way, my actions will be correlated to that occurring. The power of this is that it gives me an access point to doing something about my (and others') performance because, as I am learning from this book, I can do something about shifting how situations occur to me (but I can't do much about my psychology).One of the other notions that struck me in this book is the explanation for the phenomenon of how the more things change the more they stay the same. It distinguish between changing things in the content versus shifting the context inside of which that content shows up. If the context remains the same and you change the content then that new content will show up in the old context thus reinforcing the old context - hence the more things change the more they stay the same. But if you shift the context (which this book distinguishes how to do) then you can have new possibilities available that weren't possible in the old context.These ideas have already given me new insights and perspectives in my personal relationships. The "is-ness" of the people in my life is beginning to break up. My judgments about people are separating from who the people really are. And my judgments about myself are separating from who I really am.Not only is this book distinguishing that people's performance (action) is correlated to how things occur, but it is giving illustrations (stories), and distinctions, and processes for shifting/altering how things occur so that performance/action is enhanced.I highly recommend this book!Aaron

This book provided me a with a simple, yet, very powerful way to shift my paradigm from situation to situation. In my opinion it is a must read for anyone who wants to change something.

The book serves as a great reference about a completely new perspective regarding performance. The concept of performance is broadened here to cover any intention that is to become reality and that the way one looks at that which is to realized determines the outcome. The book describes the power of this approach through unquestionable breakthrough results obtained in a surprisingly short amount of time... but it takes something to develop change agents to become proficient in the new model for performance. While some old problems get easily solved in the new frame of reference, new problems arise such that the need for managers and leaders to move from solution driven management in which one propels the other to the solution, into an aspiration type of management which requires significant work in developing the listening skills to distinguish the paradigm of the individual performing and enable the performer from whence he/she is. This is not trivial work... but it can be done and it is worth it. Why not having performance with elegance and enabling people to be responsible for their own performance?

In this path breaking book, the authors have attempted to “make sense” and take a holistic view of disparate, dis-empowering situations, issues and behaviour patterns in our lives. They are suggesting that mere prioritization of what we perceive as occurring would not rescue us out of the morass.The book suggests that we need to bore down to a more fundamental, underlying stratum encompassing our underlying beliefs. It is here that individuals and organisations can gain the perspective and become conscious of certain immutable laws that would allow them to shift out of dis-empowerment and improve performance.The book asks a very important question. “How do we rewrite the future of our self and our organisation to allow an empowering vision?” It suggests that with such rewriting, our current situation can get transformed to allow for elevated performance and success levels.I take this opportunity of quoting from the book’s introduction.. For every “problem,” there is a future that's already been written about it.This future includes people's assumption, hopes, fears, resignation, cynicism, and “lessons learned” through past experience. Although this future is almost never talked about, it is the context in which people try to create change.At the heart of the authors’ reasoning is this fundamental concept.That , even though we may not be conscious of this, we, as individuals and organisations, always create our default future and we are subconsciously choosing beliefs, thoughts, options and behaviours that make this future come true. There is no escape from this other than rewriting that default future.The book , through its impressive repertoire of organisational case studies from different parts of the world, theorises that as individuals and organisations apply the 3 laws of performance and use that to rewrite their future, they experience a transformative breakthrough in their performance.The authors believe that similar to the Universal Laws of the Science viz. Law of Gravitation, Laws of motion etc. there also exist three laws of performance which are inviolate and universally applicable. The author’s point of view is that ( to quote), “When the Three Laws in this book are applied, performance transforms to a level far beyond what most people think is possible.”