Discovery Questions: Performance Variability

We must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling.Edgar Schein

Work is rarely a straightforward application of procedures or precise repetition of what was done in the past. Work is uncertain, dynamic, and complex, hence partly unpredictable. This can, for example, be due to changes in demands to produce certain outcomes, or quantities. Changes may have origin outside an organisation (eg demands from clients, sudden influx of patients or the arrival of new competition) or originate inside the organisation (eg internal competition or requests from other departments).

There are also sources of variability from dealing with distractions, failures, disruptions, surprises, breakdowns, and other things that are unintended but nevertheless part of the operational reality. As a result, performance varies.

The point is that adaptations and variations are normal, and do not happen in isolation: performance – both good and bad – is intimately connected to the conditions that people work in.

To understand performance it may be good to broaden the picture of how work varies from time to time. Some changes vary predictably (for example more in the morning, or on Friday nights), whereas other changes represents more of a surprise for workers. Either way, it is helpful to understand the performance variability, both its frequency as well as their quality and intensity of how work varies. Someone interested in learning about how these aspects play out will have to speak with the people who experience them in practice. When doing so, the below questions can provide good starting points for the conversation:

• When/where is your work most difficult?
• What is your most/least preferred time to work here?
• Tell me about a time when your work was really intense?
• If you think about last week/month, when did you have your best performance? What happened?
• Tell me about a time when something came out of the blue and surprised you here?
• What are the things that push everyone to their limits?
• What has changed around here? What happens now that didn’t happen six months ago? Or what used to happen but doesn’t happen anymore?
• Think about a difficult time when everyone knew what needed to be done and pulled together to get a great result. What happened?

Article orginally published on Owhiro.