When process alone is wrong.

Reading Rose Shapiro's book "Suckers: How alternative medicine makes fools of us all", there was a pretty compelling point made that complementary and alternative medicine always talks about the treatments on offer, but it seldom talks about cures. Most of the language implies effectiveness of treatments, but in reality, there is no clinical evidence that any of these treatments deliver a final product. If success for these approaches is "taking money from people for false hope", then success is achieved with great regularity! However, in most cases, the people are looking for impact and results (usually with quite specific disorders and never when there's something serious going on! As pointed out in the book, people don't go rushing off for a bit of Reiki when they've got a leg hanging off after a car accident!).

So, how is this relevant to high performance? Well, we know for a fact that in the high performance world, no one would ever settle for a process that seems plausible, is presented nicely and for the most part with naive good intentions, that didn't actually consistently and irrefutably deliver the results. This approach would just be jettisoned very quickly to find a process that more effectively delivered on the required results.

We promote a lot of process or input thinking with people who work for us, but the ultimate accountability is always to have processes that deliver a performance outcome. Placebo effects are interesting, but they're not ultimately the high performance answer.

So, look around you in your performance world and ensure that there isn't too much reliance upon processes that look nice but don't actually deliver the goods. After all, there's enough quackery out there in the world of complementary and alternative medicine without adding to the pool!