Design for Cultures of Progressive Learning, not of Fear

Standing in active (versus performance-based) learning means becoming more and more comfortable to experience and confront your knowing in real-time, in the company of others. Feeling into that space, while trusting yourself in the exploration.

That space is you touching and learning to reside in your innate intelligence all the while others act as mere reflectors to it. They provide you contrast on your journey and in your work of self-belonging. You becoming iteratively more expansive versions of you.

That interior space is your guidance system situated for ever increasing waking up, for broader and deeper access. It is the mechanism for your intuitive registry coming online. Your heart — and the breadth of your creativity — releasing themselves from captivity.

Learning progressively means you begin to witness and differentiate (eg. a power lever) between external systems endeavoring to automate versus expand your thinking, being, feeling, and your innateness. This is a leadership art form of its own. Learning progressively also means denying (eg. another power lever) rather than permitting external systems to co-opt your inner knowing system.

Leadership is a fundamental and evolutionary imperative. Without consciously choosing to step in to yours, the vacuum creates itself, inviting occupation that is not you. In the automations of performative industrial (organisational, religious, cultural, governmental) systems, you have been taught (consciously or unconsciously) that leadership is a role granted to you from above. They (whomever they may be) grant you power (when/if they believe you are deserving.) Because somewhere in the crafted narrative, it is they who govern and wield the power. A narrative, in its purest form, that is entirely false.

Sure, we all play roles. Brand Manager. Tight End. First String. Lead Guitarist. Grandma. Product Lead. Actor. CEO. Executive Assistant. In our roles, we each have accountability and responsibility to particular areas of focus, outcome delivery, and shared strategy.

Rarely is any role we play an island operating exclusively by and for itself, without implications and potential for the whole. In all the systems that contain roles we play, we endeavor to build system structures that enable functioning and operating with first principles of agency, synergy, and adaptability.

Within the system structures we build and participate, inclusive of the many roles everyone plays, we intend on

• more prosperous,

• less wasteful,

• more friction-free.

And, when disciplined in the build to find that hook and flow, perhaps even

• transcendent results.

To build organisational futures fit for (re)generative stability, innovation, expansion, collectives, and wellbeing, we must internalize that nobody grants you your innate leadership abilities and capabilities.

Your knowing.

Your curiosity.

Your creative force.

Your elegant choices.

Your words and language.

Your governance and desire to grow, stretch, learn, and become.

Your decisioning.

Your belonging.

Accept that as true. Ground in that. We must then also accept as true and ground in that nobody is an island unto themselves without far and great implications for the whole. Lastly, we must accept that whole system features, processes, and ways are only as good as the use by the collective of individuals and their systemic intent.

Most sentient humans feel the tug and expectation to belong. 

To be clear, tech didn’t start the phenomenon. They merely replicated and stood up performance management in a new forum. In these contexts, programs, and ways, people dance within the dialectic of belonging externally, even over belonging internally. Performing to to enable acceptance, inclusion, and belonging. Managing impressions.

Performance management systems build themselves upon and default to methodologies of control. Design-wise, they are inherently transactional. Scarcely generative. Robotic. Seldom deeply human. Subversively coaxing. Rarely relaxing to the reptile within. 

Performance management designs for a mean regression of culture. Carving deep culture norms and standards, grooves that become system currency to remain safe. 

Or, so it might appear.

You can be assured of this. 

It invites shame, surfaces core wounds, and creates organisational waste.

To consciously design safe(r) systems, you want to come to grips with how your performance management permeates fear, erodes trust, encourages disassociation, and destroys safety. 

Of course if you intend the fear baseline, carry on. 

No system can wave the flag of inclusivity, diversity, and safety while continuing to run with traditional performance management processes — 360° and clever feedback Apps included.

Why?

Because they are all built on the same mental models. A consciousness and design intent around a program to behave into, to impress, perform to, and to follow along.

Behaving to belong works like this.

Systems designed for performance to, of, and by people, rather than against tangible and strategic outcomes, by teams, against an impressively clear vision and strategy, immediately set themselves up for the trap of impression management, systemically. It spreads, in the negative space, like an unwelcome virus.

When your default settings are calibrated to impress rather than to deliver as an operating model and mean culture frequency, you are leading and functioning in the loop.

Interrupting the deep grooves of programmed and performative ways requires you to design a different build.

When you choose to flip the fear script, you learn to actively design systems that run performance code on progressive, shared outcome-based goals and maniacally clear, co-created objectives.

You factor team alignment, the work needing doing by the roles in place to get the work done, and enable dimensional (not linear, performative, nor vanity-driven) results and measurement.

In organisations steering within a more abundant framework, you no longer run performance code on personalities, projection, fear, avoidance, and extrinsic motivations.

• Performing to is externally motivated, patterned to the fear to belong, feel needed, earn love, and form (often unhealthy) attachments. Ultimately, based on individualism and coded for eventual indifference.

• Performing with and tethered to a mean culture norm of progressive learning, becoming, creating, and experiencing against clear outcome-based strategy roots from internal motivation and coherent intent. It designs itself on mutual accountability via individual contribution and collective learning.

When enabled and allowed, a system design principle for measuring system performance must be based on an abundant (bountiful, plentiful, ample), not regressive, code. A code ultimately written on shared, strategic, and systemic outcomes. Code embodying an evolutionary understanding of inexorability.

A system design of performance management is intrinsically counter to ideation, experimentation, creativity, and innovation.

It defaults you to the homeostasis of impression management, rather than a culture of progressive learning, resulting in comfort (meaning static, immoveable), indifference (apathy and dispassion), or the mean baseline of fear and anxiety.

Stop tweaking the edges. 

Start leading change on the antiquated programming. 

Become complicit in reimagining and coding an evolved superstructure.