I want to consign the idea of business or organisational performance to Room 101.
Room 101 originates in George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is the Ministry of Love’s final torture chamber, where each prisoner is confronted with “the worst thing in the world” for them personally; for Winston Smith, that is rats.
Performance is one of those words that is being captured and put to work in areas where it does not really belong. The dawn chorus is a performance. Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert was a performance. Thames Water’s half-year results were not.
Performance evokes something visceral for us, experienced in the moment. It can be anticipated, but becomes something altogether thinner when it is recorded, and I think it dies when analysed.
Performance is an act carried through to completion, live, in front of others, with the outcome at risk until the end. In the business sense it is mostly a result measured after the act, against a target. And, there is a third sense, a calculated display for an audience, that sits between them and has become a term of suspicion: “performative”.
Artisans perform. They cannot do otherwise.
The experience that triggered this thought arose in an unexpected place, like all the best ones do. It’s autumn, and every autumn we have the log burner serviced before putting it to work in the winter. The same person, Lee, from the same company, has serviced it for well over a decade, and to watch him work is to witness a performance.
It takes a couple of hours. He completely disassembles the stove, lays it out in a precise pattern, cleans every single part of it, inspects it, puts it back together, and tests it before tidying up and leaving. You would never know that he has been, other than that we have a wood-burning stove that looks as though it’s just come out of the showroom. it is a quiet. wonderful performance.
I see individuals and teams who put on performances in the best sense of the word. Some of them are part of a business, but it’s not the business doing the performing.
And the thought that leads to is that AI will never perform. It has no sense of its audience or joy in what it is doing. That does not stop it being an enormously valuable tool. .
Can it enable performance in a person or a team? I suspect so. Will all those little agents running around, those little digital fleas on the back of bigger digital fleas, ever perform? I suspect not.
Organisations and businesses have outturns: what actually reults, against what was forecast. Those outturns may well be assisted by individuals and teams performing, but the business itself is inanimate. Businesses perform in the same way that a bucket performs. Functionally useful, maybe elegant in design, and, with a bit of luck, won’t have a hole in the bottom. Business provide a stage that others have an opportunity perform on.
For the last century, and in particular the last twenty five years, the scope for individual performance has been constrained by process, as we experience less and less room for the sort of improvisation that turned what promised to be a disaster in Köln into a triumph and an album that sold over three million copies.
The album is only the trace. The performance belonged to the people in the opera house that night.
The Apollo 13 crew, both on the spacecraft and on the ground, performed out of their skins. The organisation supporting them was, well, just the organisation. A stage.
I think it matters. As AI eats the tedium of process, performance comes to the fore. It is a human quality; a thing of beauty: the synthesis of skill, passion, purpose, improvisation and commitment to something far more important than shareholder returns.
It is the exercise of creativity in the moment.
It may well help the organisation get to a successful outturn against the goals it has set itself, but that is not the purpose of the performance. Performance is an expression of the people involved. As process is surrendered to AI, our own success will increasingly rely on our ability to perform.
We do not have to be Keith Jarrett, but what we do does need to be just the tiniest bit memorable to somebody, and an expression of who we are.
Finding the right stage is important.
I read this with interest ... it resonates with a principal I have tried to live by and tried (with mixed success) to get others to buy into. I think we focus too much on the scoreboard (in all sorts of ways). Other than I'm the short term, it is impossible to manage a scoreboard. What we can manage is performance and this is where out efforts should be directed. When we deliver the best possible performance, in the circumstances we find ourselves in, then the scoreboard will be the best it can be - whether it delights or disappoints. Often an excellent scoreboard hides a poor performance, and frequently a spectacularly good performance is hard to notice because of a disappointing scoreboard. I think this applies in almost thread of our lives, whether private or public. I also think, and hope I am not wrong, that AI will struggle with living this concept.
Well put Richard x