Why I Stopped Looking at People First
Sometimes training is just a very expensive way to avoid admitting we have not solved the real problem.
That statement may sound strange coming from someone who has spent more than twenty years working in learning and development. I believe deeply in the power of learning. I've built a career around helping people grow, develop new skills, and perform at higher levels. What I don't believe is that every performance problem is a training problem.
Over the years, I've watched organizations invest significant time, money, and energy into solutions that made perfect sense on paper but failed to create lasting change. The problem would improve for a while, everyone would breathe a sigh of relief, and six months later the same issue would show up again wearing a slightly different outfit.
Eventually, I found myself asking a different question.
What if we were solving the symptom instead of understanding the problem?
Looking for Better Answers
I've always been a learner. Not because I enjoy collecting certifications or reading business books for sport, but because I've spent much of my career trying to answer a question that has fascinated me for decades: why do some people, teams, and organizations thrive while others struggle despite everyone's best efforts?
Along the way, I studied leadership, learning and development, process improvement, workplace culture, systems thinking, psychology, and organizational effectiveness. Every discipline gave me something useful. Every model helped explain part of what I was seeing. What none of them did, at least on their own, was explain the full picture.
The more I learned, the more convinced I became that workplace performance is rarely driven by a single factor. Training matters. Leadership matters. Processes matter. Culture matters. The challenge is that they rarely operate independently from one another.
The Pattern That Kept Appearing
What changed my thinking wasn't a single book, certification, or breakthrough moment. It was years of seeing similar patterns emerge in very different situations.
One organization might be struggling with turnover while another was wrestling with quality issues. A third might be dealing with missed deadlines or customer complaints. On the surface, those challenges looked unrelated. When I dug deeper, however, I often found many of the same conditions influencing the outcome.
Sometimes people were simply overloaded and trying to do more work than available capacity would realistically allow. Other times, employees were spending enormous amounts of energy working around inefficient tools, unclear processes, or competing priorities. In some environments, certain behaviors had become so accepted that nobody stopped to question whether they were helping or hurting performance.
What fascinated me was that the symptoms rarely repeated themselves exactly, but the conditions often did.
The Question That Changed Everything
I have seen leaders ask thoughtful questions and still move toward the most familiar answer: a little more training.
Not because they were careless. Not because they didn't care. In many cases, they genuinely wanted to help their teams succeed.
The problem is that training is visible. It is easy to explain. It is easy to justify. It feels like action.
Unfortunately, training can also become a very polished Band-Aid. It may reduce the pain for a while, but if the condition creating the problem never changes, the same issue eventually returns.
That realization gradually changed the question I was asking.
Instead of asking, "What's wrong with the people?" I found myself asking, "What conditions might be shaping this result?"
That shift changed the way I look at workplace performance.
Making Sense of Complexity
As I continued studying workplace performance, I started organizing my observations. I wasn't trying to create a framework. I was trying to create a simpler way for leaders to think about a complex reality.
Over time, certain workplace conditions appeared often enough that I began paying closer attention to them. They showed up across industries, across teams, and across a wide variety of performance challenges. Eventually, those recurring conditions became what I now call the JL³ Performance Levers™:
Shared Capacity
Skill Readiness
Tool Support
System Cues
Peer Norms
Mindset Alignment
I don't think of these as six solutions. I think of them as six places to look.
They provide a practical way to examine the environment surrounding the work before deciding what action to take. They help leaders slow down long enough to understand what may be contributing to a problem before investing time and resources into solving it.
Why Conditions Matter
One idea that influenced my thinking over the years is the belief that systems tend to produce the results they are designed to produce. I encountered versions of that idea through systems thinking, process improvement, leadership research, and behavioral science. The language varied, but the message was remarkably consistent.
The same thing happened when I began reading about habits and behavior. Books like Atomic Habits reinforced something I had been observing in organizations for years: people are influenced by the conditions around them. Workplaces are no exception.
This does not remove individual responsibility. People still make choices, and performance still matters. However, if we want better results, we have to understand more than the individuals involved. We also need to understand the environment in which those individuals are expected to succeed.
Why I Wrote When Performance Stalls
Eventually, this way of thinking became the foundation for my book, When Performance Stalls.
I didn't write the book because I wanted to give leaders another theory or another model to memorize. I wrote it because I wanted to give them a practical way to slow down, look beneath the visible problem, and think more clearly before choosing a solution.
Too often, leaders feel pressure to move quickly. A problem appears, and everyone immediately starts discussing fixes. Sometimes that urgency is necessary. More often, however, a little additional understanding can prevent a great deal of wasted effort.
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
What I'm Still Learning
After more than twenty years of studying workplace performance, I don't believe I've found all the answers. What I have found is a better set of questions.
Today, when performance stalls, I am less interested in finding someone to blame and more interested in understanding what may be contributing to the situation. I look for patterns. I look for conditions. I look for the factors that may be helping or hindering success before deciding what needs to change.
Most leaders are trying to improve outcomes. Over time, I became increasingly interested in improving the conditions that create them.
That belief eventually became the foundation of the JL³ Performance Levers™, but it started with something much simpler: a desire to better understand why performance happens in the first place.