An Uneducated of the title of this Blog

Sustained Peak Performance for Individuals, Teams and organizations!

Let us start our analysis from the middle of the sentence. At the centre of it all is an individual, me. Poor I, unfortunately, think of myself as an individual and not a part of asynchronizedd whole. So when I am hit with the words - sustained peak performance - I am truly and properly hit. What does sustained mean? Isn't it only human to take breaks? What does peak mean? If I am running at my maximum, I'll burn out in a day and my total output will be much lesser than if I had gone slow and continued to work for years. And what does performance mean? Is it doing my job? Something more than that? What about the reduction in my home performance because of my increase in office performance? Or the reduction in my health performance because of my effort to keep up my office and home performance? Oh! I think I am just a good for nothing, cribbing about these things. Everyone else seems to be taking up this slogan and being really upbeat about it. There must be something wrong with me.

And this way, the fulcrum of the whole setup, the individual is broken. And the only reason it is broken is because of a lack synchronization between elements.

Let us be very clear about this. None of the words of Sustained Peak Performance mean anything by themselves. The whole idea is maximize the overall output. And that cannot be achieved by achieving the local optima. Let us take the example of a woodcutter. The woodcutter's peak speed is 10 trees in a day. So do we want him to cut trees at that rate? No, because the day he cuts 12 trees, he falls sick for next two days and does not cut any, so we basically get 12 trees in 3 days, or 4 trees per day. Plus we have to pay for his medical expenses. So should we be happy with the 6 trees that he is cutting per day, every day? Again a No. Because then we are not getting the best out of our resource. There are several things we can do, and most of the more educated articles on this blog will detail out these aspect in much clearer terms. But here are some uneducated thoughts.

First, form a team. Get some more woodcutters and form a plan for them to work together in a coordinated fashion. The first thing that will happen - the overall unpredictability of the team will go down. One woodcutter falling sick will not stop the work. The actions that we have taken here are team formation and team coordination. Then, we can find individual motivational strategies. Every individual woodcutter (or at least some of them) would stretch themselves just a bit, cutting 7 trees a day. We can find team motivation strategies, where two woodcutters cutting trees while talking to each other will not get tired will they cut 8 trees a day. We can get very individual to work at his peak for three quarters of a day and cut 9 trees, and then rest for the rest of the day and proper planning and scheduling of the work will mean that one person or the other will be working throughout the day.

Several ways to increase the total performance of the individual and the team, but not enough. Cutting a few trees with a team of woodcutters will not make a succesful organization. For one, organization is much bigger than one team. For my wood-cuting organization to perform at its peak, for example,synchronization between its recruitment and operations departments have to be perfect for the right amount of people to be available when the work starts every morning.

More importantly, organizations needs to have a Vision. An Organization needs to know very clearly the purpose of its existence, and the direction it wishes to take to achieve that purpose. Then it needs to be good at what it is doing, it needs to do all the right things and in the right ways. In other words, it needs Operational Excellence. All this we have described. But is that enough? No! What we need to top it all is to find new ways of enabling each woodcutter to cut more trees per day, we need to find new ways for the groups of woodcutters to work better together, we need to find new woods to cut and new people to buy those woods. In Jargon terms, we need Innovation, at individual, team and organizational levels.

These are just some of the things that come to this illiterate mind. The other posts in this blog attempt to give us better ideas on how to achieve all this.

There's another way in which I can express what I want here. In my organization, what I want is that every individual woodcutter to cut the maximum number of trees that he can cut every day, I want every team to boost every individual's performance and to collectively deliver more than the total on individuals. In the end, I want all the teams to coordinate and assist with each other to enable smooth running of every unit. And I want to use every means possible to keep on increasing the output of each individual, each team and the organization. Last but not the least, I want my organization to continue to operate at its best for ever, and for that, I want to understand the role of my organization in the society and how I can fit without causing a disturbance which negatively impacts either an individual, a team or an organization.

Lets see how this blog gives us pointers to these things.

In the end, a small note. Hope all this makes sense.