Book Review: The Three Laws of Performance

The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life.  by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA. 2009

The Three Laws of Performance is not the kind of book I usually review on this blog. Written for an audience committed to improving the performance of business organizations, it might be hard to see what this book has to do with creating a peaceful world. I have also written about transformational peacemaking and shifting the conversation about peace and violence in the world. The ideas outlined in this book, though oriented toward the business community, are eminently transferable to the larger challenge of creating change in the international geopolitical arena where war, terrorism and genocide take place.

Authors Share a Commitment to Unprecedented Results

The authors, Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, share a lifelong passion centered around one question: How can people perform beyond their limits? Zaffron became involved with this issue during the 1970’s with the EST movement, and is now CEO of the Vanto group and is an executive and board member of Vanto’ parent company, Landmark Education. Logan has been an associate professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of South California and is also a consultant to many Fortune 500 companies. Together they are committed to bringing transformation into corporate settings. I am a graduate of Landmark Education, which has touched my life and shaped my thinking.

Extraordinary Stories of Amazing Achievements in this Book

In many anecdotes and stories Logan and Zaffron share stories of the organizations they have worked with and the remarkable changes that have happened as a result of the work they have done with people in groups. One of the most remarkable of these, to my mind, is the ongoing work, in South Africa at the Lonmin platinum mine. They continue to work there with 25,000 employees and 300,000 people in surrounding communities to transform their futures. It is astonishing and thrilling work, not the least because of its scale and its boldness of vision.

The three laws apply to individuals as well as to groups and are universal:

1. How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
2. How a situation occurs arises in language.
3. Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.

A New Idea: Taking Transformation to the World Stage

The authors give clear coaching about how to put these laws into effect in one’s own life, whether one works alone or in an organization. Despite the example of the Lonmin mine, no one I know in transformational circles, is actively talking about the potential for transformation to assist in making radical and rapid changes in international war and peace situations.

Pioneers Who are Currently Using Large Scale and Transformational Processes

One who comes close is Don Beck, the creator of the Spiral Dynamics model. While Spiral Dynamics is an evolutionary model of human and cultural dynamics, and not a transformational model, Don Beck used it during South Africa’s transition out of apartheid and is currently using it in experiments in the Netherlands and in the Middle East. Others using transformational peacemaking approaches are Arnold Keiser at the Organization for International Cooperation and Jack Berriault at the Israel Palestine Project.

The Future Holds Whatever We Can Create

For my money, transformation is the next wave in peacemaking. It is has worked before in history. Human beings decided to end slavery and slavery ended. A group of people decided they had had enough of tyranny and declared their independence and a new nation was born. If enough people on this planet decided they had had enough of war and violence, war would end. If enough people decided they wanted to create a world that worked for everyone, then we would create that. If enough of us want that, we can make it happen. We have only to choose it and intend it.

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