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November 7, 2006

Be Careful What You Ask For, You Might Get It

Recruiting for "performance" relies of course on what is measurable, but even intuitively we know that an "unqualified" or "incompatible" or "misapplied" resource, if found, will be a key factor of an explanation for performance shortcomings.

The difference between potential, production, and performance is something often assumed to be self evident. Yet not only is the difference given final credibility only through "objective" measurement, but the gaps between the three points are actually seen as more important to manage than the three points themselves.

That is, resources are often seen to be *starting out* at one of the three points -- after all, we make a big point of "acquiring" them that way, whereas the real work (supposedly) is to get them to move up. Then, because we want an easier time of moving them up, we try to determine what characteristics at each level of acquisition are already the best predictors of a high rise.

From an analytic point of view, the question must therefore also come up as to why the predictors are reliable. In other words, if the predictors are singled out because of their association with desirable outcomes, is it because they are causes or are they just prerequisites?

"Development" is the generic term for engineering productivity from potential, while "management" typically stands for engineering performance from production. This brings up two more topics to consider. One: what type of resources are most compatible with development and management? And two: what kinds of development and management are best at moving resources up the value chain?

It's a fact that these perspectives essentially anticipate "processing" the resources -- but meanwhile the utilization of the resource becomes a third major dimension of the picture. That is, in the big picture, the Predisposition of the resource (its starting characteristics), the Processing of it (through engineering), and finally the Positioning of it (its utilization) will effectively decide how the resource relates to the outcome that we'll call performance.

In explaining performance, it thus becomes both notable and logical to discriminate -- not just suspect -- the point of failure or disabling constraint. In low performance, is the problem a resource? And if yes, then is it that the resource had a bad predisposition (low intrinsic quality)? Poor compatibility (hard to process)? A bad assignment (deficient position)?

In answering those questions, it will be necessary (for the sake of intellectual honesty) to identify whether the applied (or withheld) development and management was appropriate to the identifiable prospects for success. By prospects, we mean that we understand a rational relationship between what characteristics of resources should be opportunities for performance leverage -- and HOW they are opportunities.

Most often, sports provides a laboratory for observing how prospects fare. A resource becomes a part of a system, and may thrive or not. Superstar college quarterbacks disappear in the systems of losing teams that draft them and can't resolve a mismatch with the talent. Third-round draft picks costing orders-of-magnitude less money go to well-run teams that nurture a role or two in which the player becomes a league standout.

As architects of business processes know (and practice), the definition of a role is one of the two most decisive factors in process performance, with the selection of actors for the role being the other overwhelming determinant. It sounds like a simple idea, but the role definition and the actor selection turns out to be full of the nuance of interactivity, reliability, flexibility, strength and availability that finally accounts for whether the process runs well under the demand that is placed on it.

Given that demand is both variable and influential (some call it "pressure"), it cannot be ignored in the exercise of evaluating resources. The resource must help make an adequately sustainable process successful under demand. But the demand cannot be undefined. And the method by which the resource supports the process cannot be arbitrary. There's a way to make a sheet of paper hold up a brick, but you still wouldn't want to stand on the contraption if you had any choice. Yet both paper and bricks have their place in the makeup of a successful housing structure, as proven over hundreds of years of design.

Roles address the issue of whether a resource is a cause or a prerequisite. In a sense, a role says either "neither" or "both". In saying "both", the role means that the resource is integral to a system that produces the desired results, without saying that the system will necessarily always produce that way. Systems host processes, while the resources materially constitute the system. (Some might argue that systems "occupy" processes, which is an insightful description of the relationship between design/process and the construction/system that "realizes" the design. Increasingly, this is being called "orchestration".)

The punchline to this is that the secret of excellent resource selection lies in knowing the architecture that accounts for why outputs and outcomes can be predicted. In that architecture, the roles given to resources are part of a framework that helps point out when a resource is going to readily fit into the value chain of potential to production to performance.

Roles strongly help to define the prospects. In recognizing that the prospects may be quite idiosyncratic to the given organization, it becomes apparent that two very similar resources from different organizations may not amount to the same prospects at all -- and before these resources are acquired they should be evaluated as prospects of the future, not as products of their histories.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at November 7, 2006 11:45 PM

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