TRANSFORMING PERFORMANCE FOR THE FUTURE
The new mental model for leading organisations into the future.
Companies today are faced with a false choice: Perform harder or transform faster? In reality, there is no choice. In a world of daily disruption, companies must do both.
Leaders of today and the future must redefine performance to include transformation within performance metrics.
The Fortune 1000 companies around the world we’ve been working with lately are struggling with simultaneously performing and transforming. They’re also wondering if their teams have the capabilities needed to carry their businesses forward successfully into an unknown future.
Two currently competing mindsets
We’ve been seeing a tug-of-war of leadership mindsets, leading to conflict.
Some leaders are doubling down on a performance mindset. Their approach is, “We’ve got the people and skills that have always worked before, everyone just needs to work harder (e.g., “We don’t have time to pause and innovate. Triple the effort, triple the output. Make the numbers!”).
It’s tempting to rely on what’s worked in the past: Certainty, control, speed, and grind. But this model sacrifices what’s needed for future success in an exponentially changing world.
Other leaders are committed to a transformation mindset, This approach accounts for needed future innovation but risks falling behind on results in a “slow down now to speed up later” fashion (e.g., “We must step back, pause, reimagine, and reinvent. What got us here won’t get us there!”).
Both mindsets are valid, but both are flawed, if done in isolation. Few companies know how to do both well.
The new model: Transforming Performance
What is needed is a shift in mental models, from performance as optimisation to performance as evolution. In a world that demands agility, reinvention, and resilience, performance can no longer be defined by only short-term metrics and efficiency.
The old model was a machine programmed to produce the same outputs repeatedly, fast, and at scale. The new model must be a living organism—agile, adaptable, and evolving.
The new model must reframe performance itself. It has to ask: What (or whom) are we performing for? Are we just running harder in old models or building the future with intention?
Performance must fuel transformation.
Redefining what performance means
As we’ve shown, old-school performance metrics (like transactions, efficiency, and margins) aren’t enough anymore.
The world is too dynamic and complex for only predictable measures of success.
Performance must now include transformation efforts:
Strategic clarity that flexes with context.
Cultural resilience that withstands disruption.
Adaptive capacity that senses and responds in real time.
Transformative agility that reinvents as needed.
Transforming performance capabilities
Leaders can no longer include transformation as a separate initiative. They need to evolve the essential capabilities for success and include those that lead to transformation.
Transforming performance capabilities include Traditional capabilities (e.g., setting goals, hitting numbers, being efficient).
These honor and bring forward the best of past achievements and include:
Goal setting & accountability
Operational efficiency
Financial discipline
Quality execution
Risk management
Evolving capabilities (e.g., learning, agility, cultural resilience).
These lean into what is most important and necessary in the now and include:
Team resilience & wellbeing
Customer-centric agility
Inclusive culture & belonging
Talent development & learning
Cross-functional collaboration
Transformative capabilities (e.g., navigating change, sensing and responding to shifting markets, aligning culture with future strategy).
These help future-proof your company.
Strategic adaptability
Innovation & experimentation
Change leadership
Ecosystem thinking
Organizational renewal (e.g., redesigning structures or models)
Each company defines its own version of these, but the key is to see them all as forms of performance, not separate capability categories of “hard” vs “soft” or “old” vs “new.”
