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The Three Laws of Performance — Chapter-03: Rewriting a Future That's Already Written

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3 Rewriting a Future That’s Already Written In May 1997, Malcolm Burns, a wiry, intense but soft-spoken Australian, walked to the front of a room ﬁlled with a hundred executives, managers, and union leaders, and said something so loud and surprising that many wondered what had happened to the managing director of their company, BHP New Zealand Steel. Most of the people in the room knew Burns only through his reputation. When he ﬁrst arrived at the company, the local newspaper had tagged him ‘‘Slash and Burns’’ because of his reputation for cutting costs and workforce size. Many of the managers and employees had believed he would close the plant. The plant had seemed preordained to fail, and closing it seemed to be the obvious thing to do. The plant, too small to beneﬁt from large economies of scale, produces rel- atively expensive steel. Unlike most companies that make money by selling steel ‘‘in country,’’ BHP New Zealand exports two-thirds of its product, subjecting it to international market ﬂuctuations. Between 1989 and 2004, the international price of steel declined to record-low levels. 65

66 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE As Ian Sampson, the head of human resources for the plant, told us: When you think about it, we were expecting the impossible from the employees. Headcount was going down, change was everywhere, and the business was built on shaky technical assumptions. It was widely known that we might close down entirely. And yet we needed people to become proactive, posi- tive, energetic, and to dramatically change their relationships with each other. In the meeting, Burns started: I think we’ve done a lot of good planning and efﬁciency work, but it won’t get us to success. I’ve been sitting here, thinking about what will. It gives me a problem. I now know we need a future that excites us, and I’m not the kind of guy that can do that. I’m an operator. I love making things work, but I’m not a visionary. I can’t come up with that future. I’m going to put together a process that’ll allow everyone to collaborate on creating the future that we need. I do know this—I’ll know it when I hear it. His tone was ﬁery and passionate as he declared: Once we have it, if you work with me to make it real, you’ll be my partner. If you don’t, I’ll ﬁght you like an alley cat. In fact, I’ll ﬁght like an alley cat with anyone at headquarters who doubts our future, with any politicians whose actions and policies are damaging to our future, with customers and suppliers who are not supporting us for the future, and anyone else in the community whose words or deeds are likely to create problems for our future.

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 67 As the audience’s reaction went from shocked to excited, many rising to their feet and applauding, he stood and shouted, ‘‘And if you don’t think I am living up to these commitments, tell me!’’ Their quiet, technical manager had become an outspoken, articulate, and even charismatic leader. For the next year, he did ‘‘ﬁght like an alley cat’’ with those who opposed the future that was created, and he partnered with those who supported the future. Burns had rewritten his own future; now he sought to rewrite the future of the company. Two years later, the work was done. At 6:00 am on a Saturday morning, six hundred employees gathered to say good-bye to the man who had not only kept the plant open but also allowed it to ﬂourish. Safety performance had improved by 50 percent, key benchmark costs had fallen by 15 to 20 percent, return on capital had increased by 50 percent, and raw steel produced per employee had risen by 20 percent. All this had happened while the workforce was reduced by 25 percent in a positive, constructive, and cooperative manner. The company kept up the momentum, and today is branded as the world’s only boutique steel producer. During the farewell ceremony, after a prayer from the plant chaplain and blessings from the local Maori tribes, Burns presented the whole workforce with a steel wall sculpture made from product in the plant, in the shape of an alley cat. It is now hung with pride in a place in the conference room where all can see it and be reminded of its signiﬁcance as they continue the company’s transformation. What produced this turnaround? Was it some charismatic quality that Burns developed? Was it the relationships that he forged? Was it process improvements that were implemented?

68 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE Throughout history, a few exceptional people have pro- duced results that left others scratching their heads about what had happened. In most cases, their followers aren’t able to do what they had done, which makes their efforts occur as all the more unusual. We spent years studying people like Burns and situations like New Zealand Steel, where the results continued after the leader moves on. The purpose of this chapter is to make what he did available to a wide group of people. What we learned is that dramatic gains in performance always stem from a shift in how the situations occur to people, as captured by the Third Law. The Third Law of Performance Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people. The Third Law rests on a fundamental distinction: there are two different ways to use language. The ﬁrst is descriptive—using language to depict or represent things as they are or have been. The test of good descriptive language is whether it accurately articulates the world as it is, whether people see the world rightly. Descriptive language is often used to look back, spot trends, and predict what will happen. Descriptive language is useful and important—try getting around New York City without a map, or ordering dinner without a menu. How would you feel if your surgeon couldn’t describe the procedure about to be performed on you, or if your stockbroker couldn’t describe your portfolio? Descriptive language has its limits—you can’t create something new by merely describing what was and is. Using

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 69 descriptive language to talk about the future is limited to prediction based on past cycles and current realities. The Barbados Group was intrigued when a result surpassed what seemed possible. In all of the situations that we studied, the way people talked and communicated was not descriptive. There was little or no prediction. People crafted new futures that were not likely to happen, but that they committed to anyway. People were talking in a way that we call future- based. Future-based language, also called generative language, has the power to create new futures, to craft vision, and to elim- inate the blinders that are preventing people from seeing possibilities. It doesn’t describe how a situation occurs; it transforms how it occurs. It does this by rewriting the future. The Power of the Future We can now go more deeply into the future—where it comes from, what sustains it, and how generative language can rewrite it. You can see the power of the future in the question, Does money make you happy? Most people say no, but the answer is more complicated. Take two families. One made $200,000 last year; the second, $50,000. Next year, both expect to earn $100,000. The ﬁrst will be unhappy, and the second, happy. Why? Because it’s not the actual money you have today that makes you happy or unhappy; it’s the money you expect you’ll have, believe you’ll have, hope you’ll have, or fear you’ll have that shapes your experience of money right now. The ﬁrst family will cut back, maybe sell their home. The second will buy a bigger house, take a vacation, and get a new car. A universal principle becomes clear in this example: peo- ple live into the future they see coming at them, not the

70 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE actual future they’ll get to someday. Unless people have done something radical to alter their course, the future they are living into is their default future. By default future we don’t mean the inevitable future—such as aging and eventually dying—but rather what is going to happen in our experience, whether we give it much thought or not. Our default future consists of our expectations, fears, hopes, and predictions, all of which are ultimately based on our experience in the past. Incidents from the past live on as prediction, giving us our default future. When we interviewed employees at New Zealand Steel about their default futures, as individuals and as groups, the picture was consistent: the plant would close, the economic effects would devastate the tiny community, some people would go on welfare and never work again, other people would move and never return. The people at New Zealand Steel lived into the default future by ﬁghting Malcolm Burns, threatening walkouts, and strengthening the unions. At the Polus Group in Japan, the default future was that the company would never again be the vibrant, driving force it had been. The sons would do their best, but without their father to lead them, the company would lose its momentum, slowly declining in prominence and proﬁtability. Some smaller form of the company would survive, but its best days were behind it. The people of the Polus Group lived into this default future by squabbling and putting in less than their best effort. At Lonmin, the case in Chapter One, the default future was one of conﬂict, with the unions ﬁghting each other and management. Deaths from AIDS, homicide, and mine accidents were unpreventable and inﬂicted an unrelenting grief on the community. The people of Lonmin dealt with

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 71 this default (and almost certain) future by ﬁghting for a bigger share of the resources and going on strike. Again and again, the default future is a projection of what happened in the past, all told through descriptive language. Without generative language, people attempt to ﬁght the future, paradoxically making it even more likely. Remember: whatever we resist, persists. Notice that the default future has a lot to do with how situations occur in the present. Unless we do something— something other than ﬁghting the future we see coming—it becomes the default setting. It will happen, no matter how much we don’t like it or try to resist it. The Power of Future-Based Language Future-based language projects a new future that replaces what people see coming. It doesn’t modify the default future; it replaces it. The future goes from the default to what our editor Warren Bennis calls an invented future. Future-based language is responsible for historical moments becoming turning points. Benjamin Franklin is credited with having invented the word American and, in so doing, trans- forming thirteen warring colonies into a nation. His words displaced what most political analysts of the day predicted was inevitable—that the colonies would never speak with one voice. When Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘‘I have a dream,’’ he created that dream in others—and displaced the default future of racial segregation. After the works of Franklin and King, people who lis- tened to what they said saw a new future, one that had not been included in the default future. Ultimately, as the words of Franklin and later of King took root in the American

72 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE consciousness, people found themselves drawn into a new future and acting to bring it about. The future they lived into had transformed, as did their actions. When ﬁfty-two men wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, the future of a nation was created. The writers of that document didn’t describe a new future. They declared the future of a new nation, one that was a break with the past and the beginning of a unique social experiment. (To make this point through an absurdity: imagine the impact the Founding Fathers would have produced if they had titled their document the Description of Independence.) Today, Americans are the future these ﬁfty-two men created over two hundred years ago. In World War II, the way the conﬂict occurred to the British was transformed by Churchill’s speeches. Across the Atlantic, Americans’ perceptions of the war were reshaped by Roosevelt’s famous ﬁreside chats. It wasn’t because Churchill and Roosevelt fed people a positive spin on what was hap- pening. In fact, people saw the difﬁcult truth of the situation, but at the same time the leaders invented a future in which victory was unfolding in the midst of hardships. Churchill and Roosevelt were not trying to temporarily energize the citizens and soldiers of their countries. They were generating, in their speaking, a future worth living into, even when the situations and circumstances seemed gloomy and treacherous. Future-based language is generative in its ability to invent what didn’t previously exist. Churchill and Roosevelt’s passion and determination went far beyond motivational speaking. A motivational speech pumps up a crowd for an hour, then dissipates as life gets back to normal. Motivation makes people feel good about themselves, maybe even inspired. But those feelings don’t replace the default future that they’re living into.

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 73 The act of creating a new future displaces whatever default future was already there. It has staying power. Let’s turn to your performance challenge. Think back on how the situation occurs to you. Notice that, even without trying, you think of past events. Your inner voice describes them and, based on what happened, predicts whether they will happen again or not. Consider the future in more detail, for yourself, your rela- tionships, your family, and your company. What will happen if things continue on as they have been? Are you resisting or ﬁghting to make something happen or not happen? Does your default future have any space in it to create something new, or is it all ﬁlled up? What if, right now, you could substitute that future with another? Not one based on what’s happened before, but some- thing new? What if the future you see coming were to alter in its substance, going from default to invented? Also, notice the connection between your future and how situations occur to you. See that if you rewrote your future, you would live into it now. Rewriting your future alters how situations occur in the present. Imagine being one of those people who could create a future that you and others would live into, for years or decades. Doing so requires that we fully create a blank space and then make declarations into that space. The Condition Required for Future-Based Language You can’t paint a picture on top of a picture on a canvas. You can’t write a sentence on a page that is ﬁlled up with writing. You can’t create a future when there is already one coming at

74 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE you. Before anything is to be created, there has to be a space of nothingness. The canvas must be empty; the page, blank; and the future that you were living into, somehow emptied out. But how do you empty out the future that you are currently living into? There are three dimensions to this process of ‘‘blanking the canvas,’’ and people often move back and forth among them until they feel they have the room to invent some- thing new. The ﬁrst dimension is seeing that what binds and constrains us isn’t the facts, it’s language—and in particular, descriptive language. We saw this part of the process in Chapter Two, as the family and executives at the Polus Group delved into the unsaid to get to issues about which they were unaware. As we saw, issues that lurk in the unsaid occur as facts. When we become aware of these issues and are able to address and articulate them, what had occurred to us as facts shifts to being interpretations. We’re able to ask, Which interpretations give us the most power? Or the most freedom? Or the most self-expression? The knots begin to release when we see that we are bound not by the facts of life but by knots of language. At the Polus Group, people couldn’t change the facts of the founder’s incapacitation, but they had something to say about their reaction to it. What seemed a certain future is now seen as only a possible future, and in that moment other possibilities start to arise. The second dimension is articulating the default future and asking, ‘‘Do we really want this as our future?’’ In Chapter One, Brad Mills led the community (and himself) to see that unless something radical happened, the community would continue to be plagued by AIDS, homicide, mine accidents,

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 75 and poverty—no matter how they tried to ﬁght against it. At the Polus Group, people saw that the company would fade into obscurity. In both cases, people’s default future shifted from cloudy to clear. As it did, people’s reactions were unanimous: we don’t want that! At both Lonmin and the Polus Group, people had a vague sense that events were headed in the wrong direction. Once they stopped, took a breath, and probed to ﬁnd out what default future they were living into, they could make a choice to construct a new future. Until people can articulate the default future—the future that’s driving their lives—they can’t make a choice to go in a different direction. Earlier in this chapter, we suggested you take a moment and ask what your default future is, especially related to your performance challenge. Like executives at Lonmin and the Polus Group, you might now ask yourself, is this future what I really want? If it is, commit to that future and bring it about. If not, keep reading—the next section shows how to create something new. Until you can articulate the future and see that it isn’t inevitable and necessary but is a construction of language, it’s impossible to make a choice. Instead, we feel constrained and attempt to ﬁght our way out. Once people have moved through both parts of the process—seeing that the default future arises in language and that, unless something remarkable happens, it’s where they’re headed—they have the room to create something new. Have you ever put your ﬁngers into Chinese handcuffs, the kind that children play with? You put your ﬁngers into the cuff and then try to pull out and all that happens is that they tighten. The harder you pull, the tighter the trap. Paradoxically, the way out of these handcuffs is to push deeper into the trap. Then the trap releases.

76 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE Likewise, the more that you can say the truth about the future you’re living into, the more you are released from the negative constricted bindings in your life and business— and the more room you have to create something new. The third dimension to creating a blank space is the most powerful: completing issues from the past. It is the subject of the next section. Completion: Generative Language That Creates Space In the 1990s, consultants ran leadership sessions in Peru’s Tintaya Cooper Mine, fourteen thousand feet up in the Andes. Originally opened as a government mine in 1985, it was bought by Magma Copper Company during the privatization movement in 1994. Prior to the purchase, it had been able to negotiate only one-year labor agreements with each of its two labor unions. The result was a constant state of argument, divisiveness, and contention. At times workers weren’t paid, and they resorted to desperate means. On one occasion the union kidnapped a senior executive as ransom for their wages, and in the process of ‘‘negotiating’’ made him walk on his knees to a church in the center of the town to beg for forgiveness. The government responded to this and other incidents by sending in troops, and in the unrest that followed, several people were killed and others hurt. One man who was merely a bystander was shot in the face and permanently disﬁgured. As his wounds turned to scars, this man made a series of decisions to deal with the wrongness of what had happened. First, he decided that what happened to him was not only tragically unfair, but part of an unfair system. Second, he would never again allow such a thing to happen. Third, to

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 77 make sure he would never be harmed again, he would hold a constant vigil against anyone in authority. Although he made these decisions about what happened in the past, they were actually decisions about the future. He couldn’t listen to the idea that the future could be different from the past. His default future was cluttered with the results of decisions he made, occurring to him as ﬁxed, closed, and determined. Notice that the result was a racket—his complaint was that people treated him unfairly, and the consistent pattern of behavior was keeping vigil. There was a clear, two-part payoff: avoiding the domination of a situation, and being right. There was also a cost: vitality, self-expression, freedom, and joy. Dealing with a racket requires the work we discussed in Chapter Two. We must become aware of all four parts: the complaint, the pattern of behavior, the payoff, and the cost. In most cases, it also requires completing an incident that happened in the past but now lives in the default future. To complete means moving an incident from the default future to the past. This process goes far beyond ‘‘getting closure’’ or ‘‘starting the healing process.’’ If you complete an incident, it no longer lives in your future. You remember it, and it can inform you, but it does not drive your actions. It also doesn’t color how situations occur to you. You are free of it, permanently. Think about your performance challenge. Is there anyone involved in the situation with which you feel distance? Per- haps any sense that something is off? From our experience, when people look, they know. What you’re seeing are incom- pletions—something that lives in your future, some baggage from the past. One dictionary deﬁnition of incomplete is ‘‘lack- ing a part or parts, not whole.’’ Another deﬁnition is ‘‘not

78 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE concluded.’’ The issue that is not concluded may be about your present company, a past company, even about another person or group of people. An incompletion lives in the occurring, not in the facts. Generally it lives in the unsaid and commu- nicated. As you continue to look for incompletions, look to see if anything triggers a sense of something missing, of distance, or of something that is not concluded. Some places you can look are resentments, regrets, integrity issues (such as broken agreements), lack of acknowledgment for your or another’s contribution, or participating in gossip (which diminishes the person who was the target of the gossip). You may become aware of an incident that you’re con- scious of but have been withholding. You may also sense that something is just off, but you can’t put your ﬁnger on what it is. Either way, you can use future-based language to complete the incident. There is no recipe for completion, but there is a basic movement of the conversation:

Start a conversation with the person with whom you need to complete the issue. Create a frame in which completing the issue is of beneﬁt to the relationship.
Address what happened—what you decided, what you did or didn’t do, that’s between you and the other person. Because you’ve harbored it, you have to take responsibility for the diminishment of the relationship. It may even be to such an extent that you ask to be forgiven. Notice the use of language that is much more potent than descriptive: ‘‘I acknowledge taking responsibility for it.’’ The very act of saying this is an action: acknowledgment is created in the moment you utter these words.

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 79 3. Take whatever action is necessary, such as apologizing or giv- ing up the racket. When we give something up, forgive, are forgiven, a new space opens up. Again, this part of the conversation requires generative language, such as ‘‘I’m giving up the grudge I’ve been harboring for years.’’ Creating a new future requires a constant commitment to being complete with everyone involved. Doing so creates and sustains a blank space into which the new future can be created. One question that comes up is, ‘‘What if I can’t contact the person with whom I am incomplete?’’ In some cases, the person may have died. In the case of the man from Tintaya, he didn’t know the soldier who had shot him. He completed the incident with mine president Lee Browne, who had no involvement with what happened but, in the mind of the man, represented the authority that had hurt him. Remembering that incompletions live in the occurring, you can ﬁnd someone to stand in for the person. You might write down what you would say to the person if he or she were still alive, then read it as though the other person were there. If you do this, you will be surprised by how real it seems to be. Even though the person is dead, they continue to live in your experience. As you examine your performance challenge, look to see what incompletions you have. Also look to see how you can start a conversation with the people in your business and life to complete the issue. Additionally, ask yourself if there’s anything that can be done to demonstrate your commitment to completion. Once Browne and the other executives learned how the man’s face had been disﬁgured, they arranged and paid for reconstructive surgery. He was transformed from a cynical, hard-nosed person to a fully committed union leader. Because

80 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE of his efforts, and those of many others, the entire company was altered. In the words of John Hetrick, the former head of Human Resources for Tintaya, ‘‘By applying the Three Laws of Performance, we not only transformed the company into a high-performance organization, we became the model for the rest of South America that fundamentally altered the industry for years to come.’’ You might also bookmark this page and reread the ﬁrst story from Chapter One, about Antoinette Grib and Selinah Makgale. You’ll see that what actually happened was that Mak- gale completed her resentment toward white, powerful women. Grib wasn’t involved in the original incident, but she could stand in for the people who were. No matter what the issue is, how long it’s lasted, or even whether the person involved is alive or dead, you can ﬁnd a way to complete it. As you do, you’re freeing up space in the future. In South Africa, people completed (for themselves) racism, homicide, exploitation, even apartheid. It’s worth pausing for a moment and considering our world with people all committed to getting and staying complete with one another. How would the world be different? A step in bringing this vision about is to use discussion groups, or the online community at www.threelaws.com, to complete any issues you have. You can download a helpful guide on how to do this in groups from our web site. Once the man from the Andes had completed the incident, he saw the managers in a new light; that is, they occurred to him in a new way. He could see that they were not the ones that had hurt him. For the ﬁrst time, he could create a new future—for himself, for his relationship to the company, and for his relationship to the people he worked with.

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 81 Once the issue has been moved into the past, you will feel a draw to create something new and alive. Another form of future-based language is declaration, which is the subject of the next section. Declaration: The Kind of Language That Creates a Future All generative language relies on speech acts—an action taken through language.5 The most fundamental of speech acts is a declaration, which brings a possible future into existence. A declared future is not a dream or a hope, but a future to which you commit yourself. When you invest your money, it’s money that is committed and at risk. When you invest yourself in a new possible future for yourself, your life, your relationship, or your company, you put yourself at risk. Why would you do that? Because creating a new future makes you the author of your life in a way few people have ever imagined. Investing in yourself, putting yourself at risk, is essential in rewriting the future. We do this by committing, which is another speech act. We put everything we have at stake for the new future. When the ﬁfty-two men created the Declaration of Independence, the document became serious business when they wrote at the end: ‘‘we mutually pledge to each other, our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.’’ Then they signed their names, literally committing their lives. In that moment, a war with England began. This brings us to how inventing a future actually works. Just as a default future isn’t certain, a created future isn’t a done deal, either. What we invent is a possibility, to which we

82 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE commit our entire being. The Declaration of Independence created the possibility of freedom, and people lived into that new future and pulled it toward them by picking up muskets and ﬁghting. After the war was won, the invented future shifted from possibility to reality with the creation of the Constitution of the United States. We can see all of these pieces, including commitment, come together as the Polus Group continued after the death of its founder. Life After Stage 0: Creating a New Future After the initial program, the family and executives of the Polus Group had the space to create a new future that would replace the default future of no leadership because the founder isn’t coming back. They put together a team of sixty people, including themselves and senior managers from the three major divisions of the company. The work began a few months later, in January 2002, and took six months to complete. The goal of the process was to develop a future in which every person had an authentic voice in the process. Unlike the way that most vision statements are constructed, there were no formulaic templates or consultants hard-driving a process. This future emerged from the group working for two full days a month for six months, often a roller-coaster ride of chaotic creative conversation and often agonizingly long alignment conversation. The process in the room involved people making propos- als, which were written and projected through a computer- generated screen. The facilitator would then check if anyone was not aligned with the proposal. Hands would go up, and one of the people was then chosen at random. Whoever was called

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 83 on then had to come forward with a counterproposal. The two would interact until they aligned. The two would then ask if anyone else wasn’t aligned. This process would continue until no hands went up. This interactive and lengthy process continued until the group had produced not only a new future, but also a new business model that would deliver that future, and strategic outcomes in the year 2012 that would be the realization of that future. The outcomes included tangible measures of the future state to be realized. Here is the future they designed in January 2002 (translated from the Japanese): Powerful Future for Polus Group in 2012 Possibilities for Polus Group in 2012 are

Being a corporation creating a value of living that attracts attention from the whole world
Being a corporation so vibrant with life that new business projects are arising one after another through employees’ idea and creation
Being the No. 1 popular and interesting corporation, a place where world-class businesspeople, students, and the children of our employees would love to work We, the Polus future design team, promise to fulﬁll this future in whatever the circumstances will be. After months of work, everyone aligned on this future. At that moment each and every person experienced enthusiasm rarely seen in an organization. People felt proud of what they had created, and the way the situation occurred to them shifted

84 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE from What are we going to do without the founder? to This is a powerful tribute to what the founder would have wanted. The future went from murky, with a twinge of impending dread, to a clear, committed vision, authored by the people themselves. Faces in the room altered, body postures straight- ened, and conﬁdence and excitement lit up the room. The power that people were experiencing was illustrated by a com- ment of one of the senior managers: ‘‘I feel like a shogun must have felt.’’ What he said demonstrated a shift in relation to the future. In the Japanese culture (like others), only the boss—and the ultimate boss, the shogun—gets to call the shots. When we realize that we have the power to declare and commit to new futures, the world occurs as a world in which you are the shogun. Until people at the Polus Group could write a future that they lived into and actively pulled toward them, they were stuck trying to patch an unworkable situation. By replacing the default future with their own creation, people collectively lived into an optimistic, exciting future. The old problems simply dropped away, and everyone’s performance altered. The entire company transformed to become a vibrant ﬁrm, attracting the best and brightest, partnering with its community, and growing beyond anything the founder had imagined. Most people don’t see the potential of generative language because of the all-pervasiveness of descriptive language. Those who do often skip the foundation required to make it work. We now turn to the principles of that foundation. Principles for Generating New Futures Generating new futures is a radical departure from how execu- tives usually lead change. Normally, top decision makers decide on a new strategy, often in concert with their consultants. The

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 85 executives then travel around and attempt to achieve under- standing and buy-in. Even with their passion and persuasion, this usual approach doesn’t shift how the situations occur to people, so it doesn’t gain acceptance. Instead, people talk about the strategy. Nothing fundamental has shifted. Further, the default future is the same, and it overwhelms the executives’ best intentions and efforts. Principle 1: Futures Inspire Action Creating a new future with a large group of people takes a radically different path; more important, it starts with a differ- ent intention: to displace nonproductive conversations with conversations that establish a future so vibrant that people are eager to bring it about. That future creates a sense of urgency, and people’s actions correlate to it. People ﬁnd themselves doing things that formerly would have occurred as impossible. All of this comes together in extraordinary performance. The following question is at the heart of designing appli- cations for generating new futures: what conversations in the organization are missing that, if created and implemented, would leave people with new pathways for action? For those interested in organizational leadership, we’ll go further into this idea in the next chapter. Every organization, like every person, is unique. The artistry is in knowing where to begin, so as to accelerate the spread of a future that pulls people toward it, one that contains new possibilities, new levels of results that can be achieved, even new levels of fulﬁllment and self-worth. Principle 2: Futures Speak to Everyone in the Process Doug Young, a Northrop Grumman vice president, is one of the new leaders of the effort to get vehicles into space. His

86 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE face conveys deep intellectual curiosity. With his precise gestures, he demonstrates the kind of exactness that’s required to manage the millions of details his work requires. In 2001, Northrop Grumman’s strategists recognized that, to keep growing, the company needed to expand into markets other than defense. Space exploration became the obvious opportunity. According to Young, ‘‘We could leverage what we did in the defense market. We were investing in this new market, and [at the time] NASA was looking for alternatives to the legacy providers.’’ After four days of work with seventy people, using the Three Laws of Performance, Young was surprised—the outcome went beyond his expectations. In his words, not only did people ‘‘move through a difﬁcult time’’ and ‘‘create a real team,’’ but more surprisingly, ‘‘we deﬁned our role within the company and the new marketplace. We suddenly found ourselves being a credible prime contractor for the next Apollo program . . . a very positive experience.’’ During the session, one of the participants came forward at a break and said, ‘‘I came [to this facilitated process] because I had to. However, during our discussion, I remembered why I got into this business, which was space travel.’’ For him, that mission was bigger than any company or competitor. ‘‘Now I’m turned on again,’’ he said. ‘‘We are going to travel in space!’’ What made this effort successful—besides what we’ve already discussed—is that people felt that the new future sat- isﬁed their concerns. Aerospace engineers, like everyone else, enter into their profession seeking to make a difference. A new future that is compelling offers the opportunity to make a difference, individually and collectively. The aerospace engi- neer who said ‘‘I’m turned on again!’’ found that opportunity. When everyone ﬁnds themselves in this situation, people pull

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 87 together for the realization of that future and for each other’s success. Over time, the motivation that inspired the people at Nor- throp Grumman would ebb and ﬂow, but the future was there to stay. Principle 3: Futures Exist in the Moment of Speaking At another mine owned by Magma Copper, executives, man- agers, and union ofﬁcials were engaged in rewriting their future. A heated argument broke out about whether or not ‘‘being a family’’ should be part of their declaration. One executive held out, saying that family has nothing to do with business. As he elaborated on his opposition, he said, ‘‘I can’t ﬁre people in my family!’’ After hours of back-and-forth discussion he realized that ‘‘it’s more important that this group own the result’’ than anything else. He said to the group: ‘‘I don’t know what I was thinking. We are a family!’’ The room exploded. Everyone stood up cheering. It was as though a hundred people were suddenly speaking with one voice. By declaring themselves family, the experience of family occurred in the room, and that experience became a critical element of the company’s future. Future-based language doesn’t describe anything in the current reality. Rather, it creates a possible future to which the speaker is giving their word in the moment of speaking. For example, when a justice of the peace says, ‘‘I pronounce you husband and wife,’’ a marriage is created in the moment of speaking, and a new future is established for the couple. When people signed their names to the Declaration of Independence, the possible future we came to know as the United States of America was created.

88 THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE Take a moment and speculate about a future for yourself and others that would • Inspire action for everyone involved • Fulﬁll the concerns of everyone involved—yourself, your family, those you work with • Be vibrant and compelling in the moment you say it As in New Zealand Steel, the Polus Group, and Northrop Grumman, crafting a future takes time. It needs ideas and creativity from you and many other people. It’s ready when everyone involved says, ‘‘This speaks for me!’’ and they give their word to make it happen. Building Companies and Lives Around Futures Malcolm Burns of New Zealand Steel was a remarkable leader because he allowed others to build a future that would inspire them. As that future developed, Burns became the walking embodiment of it. In contrast to leaders who create depen- dency, when Burns left New Zealand the company was self- reliant and self-generative. The people in the company and community were authors of their own future. There are speciﬁc actions that leaders can take to construct a future that causes themselves and others to live into it:

Commit to the discipline of completing any issues that surface as incomplete.
Articulate the default future—what is the past telling you will happen?
Ask, do we really want this default future?

REWRITING A FUTURE THAT’S ALREADY WRITTEN 89 4. If not, begin to speculate with others on what future would (a) inspire action for everyone, (b) address the concerns of everyone involved, and (c) be real in the moment of speaking. 5. As you ﬁnd people who are not aligned with the future, ask, what is your counterproposal? 6. Keep working until people align—when they say ‘‘This speaks for me!’’ and they commit to it. Part Two takes the Three Laws into leadership: leading others and turning entire organizations into global leaders. For those readers not interested in organizational issues, we suggest skipping to Part Three.

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The Three Laws of Performance — Chapter-03: Rewriting a Future That's Already Written

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