A short talk by Stephen Shapiro describing the "performance paradox": focusing on outcomes (speed, results) often prevents achieving them. Using a Formula One pit crew experiment, Shapiro shows that shifting focus from speed to style (smoothness, process) produced faster times, and he argues this has implications for business and innovation measurement, motivation, and reducing stress to enable creativity.
Chapters
Many years back, I worked with a Formula one race car team. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with Formula one, these are really fast cars that race each other. And the thing that amazed me the most about them wasn't the car, wasn't the driver, but it was, in fact, the pit crew. This is where you have a bunch of guys around a car who change the tires, fuel the car, do minor maintenance in a matter of seconds. When I worked with them, there were 20 people who would do this task, and depending on the amount of fuel in the car, it could take as little as five seconds to get the pit crew to go as fast as possible. The pit crew boss would sit there with a stopwatch and time them, and they would do this over and over and over again. And there was a point that no matter what they did, no matter how hard they tried, they could not go 1/1,000th of a second faster. This was their performance plateau. This was the best possible time they could do. Then, as an experiment, the pit crew boss told the pit crew members that they weren't going to be timed on speed, but rather style. So as they're changing the tires, they were to think smooth. As they're fueling the car and moving the hose, they were to think smooth. Yes, they were to go fast, but it wasn't just about speed. It was about style. What they found was that the pit crew shaved off 2/10 to 3/10 of a second off of what seemed to be the best conceivable time yet. When you ask the pit crew members were they going faster or slower, everyone on the pit crew felt they were going slower. And I call this the performance paradox. This is an interesting point of view when it comes to business, because in business, we get so hyper focused on the goal. Maybe it's the speed, like a pit crew, or maybe it's bottom line results. And we have quarterly earnings and we need to get there quickly. But the focus on the goal is the thing that actually prevents us from achieving it. And there's been over 100 years of research in this area that actually show that the more that we focus on the future outcome, the less likely we are to achieve it. What does that mean for innovation? First of all, what we find is the more we measure innovation and motivate people extrinsically on their creative abilities, and the less creative they are. Creativity is a process. It's something which requires things to simmer. If you hurry it, you kill it. So we need to really rethink the way we measure. We need to rethink the way we motivate. We need to find ways of putting people into the moment, reducing the stress, and allowing them to perform at their peak levels. And although this might seem counterintuitive, the more we focus on the result, the less likely we are to achieve it. This is the performance paradox.
