The Performance Culture

CHAPTER 4Awareness Practice

Forget what you “know,” ask deep questions, and do your research.

As we just saw, building awareness is the vital first step toward deploying a sustainable solution to a clearly identified problem. To solve the problem, first you have to know what the problem is. Knowing what the problem is can sound easy enough, but in many cases we struggle to identify the problem because we think we already know what’s wrong, and we already have the start of an idea for how to fix it. That unintentional confidence can be a major stumbling block toward resolving the issue, because the sense of being right prevents leaders from removing ego, bias, preferences, and preconceived notions from their decision-making process. It’s important to be willing to see something in a new and novel way, but that can be incredibly challenging when you’ve often been rewarded for quickly having the right answers, and lifted up for being able to make decisions quickly.

To be prepared to find the answers, you must accept that you don’t already have the answers. To get closer to the root of the problem, you have to go searching.

In this practice chapter and the three practice chapters that come after each element in the ABCS model, you’ll find the “Key 3” building actions that bring the model to life. For Awareness, those Key 3 tactics are: Forget what you “know,” Ask deep questions, and Do your research. These tactics are also in sequence, because the order matters. For instance, ...