The 3 Laws of Performance- Law #2

Three Laws of Performance

The best-selling book, Three Laws of Performance was written by Steve Zaffron of The Vanto Group and Dave Logan of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

One of the authors, Steve Zaffron is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Worldwide. 

In this blog, we will be discussing the second law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.  Our previous discussion of the first law of performance can be found here.

The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur for them.”

The second law of performance states, “How a situation occurs arises in language.”

What does this mean?

From our previous article, you can see the importance of our occurring world, which is distinct from the facts.  The second law of performance explains the origin of the different occurring worlds from person to person.

The occurring world is given by what we say, to ourselves and to others.  Each person says, using language, different things which cause situations to occur differently to from person to person.

Here is an example.  Two members of the same sales team with equal amounts of training are selling the same product and have the same sales goals to reach.  The task of selling their product is greatly influenced by how the task occurs to them.  How the task occurs to them is shaped by their language, and more specifically, what they say about the task to themselves or others.

Making sales and reaching sales goals could occur as hard work and very difficult to one salesman. This is because he may say to himself or others, “nobody really wants this product.” This certainly would cause this task to occur, hence be experienced as, as hard and difficult.

On the other hand, the same task could occur as easy and fun for the other salesperson. This could be because the language he uses that creates the way the job occurs for him could be something like, “people cannot do without this product.” It is very likely that this salesperson will sell more and outperform the other.

One salesperson is more effective than the other because their performance is shaped by how the task occurs to them, which was created by their language/speaking.

In summary

The way to impact performance is to first distinguish the language already there and used regarding a certain situation.  The next is to generate different language to create a new occurring regarding the task or situation.

The 3 Laws of Performance- Law #1

Three Laws of Performance

The best-selling book, Three Laws of Performance was written by Steve Zaffron of The Vanto Group and Dave Logan of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

One of the authors, Steve Zaffron is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Worldwide. 

In this blog, we will be discussing the first law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.

The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.”

Another way of stating this is how people act or behave correlates to how people, things or situations occur to them.

What does this mean? 

Our action always make complete sense to us, however, we are often confused, frustrated or annoyed by the actions of others.  But the people taking these actions are somehow not confused, frustrated or annoyed like we are.  How is that? The circumstances in which they are acting occur to them differently than they do to you and they are acting accordingly to how the circumstances occur to them. 

We as humans confuse the actual facts of a situation with how the situation occurs to us.  There is a distinction between the facts and how the facts occur to us.  This is how there can be a car accident with 20 witnesses and 18 different stories of what happened. It occurred to each person differently. A fact is that one car involved in the accident was going 40 miles per hour.  To one observer, the car could have occurred as going very fast, while that same car could have been going rather slow to another because one observer was a five year old and the other was a race car driver.

How does this apply?

The same situations occur differently to different people, giving different actions. 

Lets take a party for example.  One person could be sitting in a corner and another could be in the center of the room talking with everyone. Why the different behavior?

The easy answer is because one likes parties and the other does not, or one is shy and the other is not.  However, it is the different occurring for each person that gives liking or not liking parties, or being or not being shy. The occurring for the person in the corner could be that, “big groups are uncomfortable and risky” while the occurring for the socialite could be that, “new people are great!”  After seeing the distinct ways the same situation occurs for two different people, it is simple to understand the distinct sets of actions.

The occurring is what gives the actions, being perfectly correlated with each other. 

It is now easier to understand the different things people do, the ways they behave and their performances are all given by the way the situation occurs to them in a business or organizational setting as well.

If people are doing things to your disliking, that are confusing or are frustrating, it is because the situation at hand occurs for them differently that it does for you.