Putting a little science into the art of Performance

More than delivering successful outcomes, to Julian performance flows from understanding – over time – what causes those outcomes. He believes that people perform their consistent best when they have a method for finding out its causes.

He likes to get people talking about what they might say or do to leverage the biggest future difference, but first he gets them to explore what really is and has been happening. Vitally, he then asks them to make their move only after they have established the means by which they will be able to evaluate the intended difference if and when it occurs.  He has developed a diagnostic/ prognostic measurement tool called BaseLine© that makes this evaluation easy to do – and in real time.

BaseLine© is a small piece of software that simply helps people convert their own numbers into a picture of their system – so they can see how it has changed and how it’s changing. The picture prompts really powerful conversation with all those who think they know the context – often leading to game-changing insights, albeit sometimes along with a few shattered illusions. It is a statistical tool, but as one user says “BaseLine© is so easy to use that even numerophobics discover that they can actually do statistics.”

Performance1 people use it to help their clients think about the systems they're working in – so they can talk straighter, improve relations, and then more easily agree how in concert they can act on those systems.  BaseLine© enables people to be scientists, because any action can now be seen for what it is – an experiment, one that may or may not lead to a set of predicted outcomes. Since all outcomes vary, then by simply separating signal from noise the variation can magically offer the profoundest of insights.

Julian’s career background was in operations, but nowadays he thinks of himself as a business coach – and facilitator, sometimes of events involving more than a hundred people if that’s what it takes to get the whole system set up for informed action. He has worked extensively with both private and public sector organisations – notably Clarks shoes, BMW, Corus Steel, Shell, the Environment Agency and the NHS. Incidentally, BaseLine© in 2010 was endorsed by the NHS Institute for Innovation & Improvement and is fast becoming widely used by clinicians, managers and even patients.

In his spare time Julian likes to write and, with his band, perform his own songs. He believes that a little science helps them to continually improve their art.