We want the team to move faster. To be more accountable. To show ownership, initiative, and willingness. To have grit, resilience, and perseverance. To be more results-oriented.

We want these things because…well, it must be because we feel like we don’t have them. Or don’t have enough of them.

And it can feel like we’ve been asking, both nicely and maybe not so nicely, for these things for a long time.

There is a word you should know.

Phenomenology.

Ugh. Terrible to look at, isn’t it? When I try to say it in my head, it feels like my brain is about to sneeze.

Don't try to pronounce it. That’s not why I’m bringing it up. I share it because the ingredients of this word are really important. While this word gets used differently among different crowds, it’s the most useful word in the world for leaders because of the two ingredients it’s built out of.

Phenomenon - stuff we see or want to see

Logic - the study of why/how stuff happens or doesn’t happen

Everyone talking about leadership talks about phenomena. In fact, it’s all they talk about. They almost never talk about logic.

They just say:

“Teams need to be more accountable.”

“Speed wins.”

“We need to have a winning mentality.”

With precisely zero logic about how that would happen.

And because of this trend, phenomenology is the exact opposite of what the majority of leaders and gurus out there do. Instead of looking at the logic, they just ask for the phenomenon itself. And that doesn’t work out as well as we hope it will.

This word is why I write this newsletter. So we can ask a disappointingly rare question: what is the logic behind the phenomena we want? I believe smart leaders want actual substance. And here you are.

Today: What is the actual logic of speed, accountability, ownership, initiative, etc.? How do we get these things?

Normal leaders try to use the easiest tool to get the things they want.

Asking.

I get it. We should just ask for the things we want. That should be enough. We work with adults. Professionals.

We’ll start by asking nicely. And if we need to, we’ll ramp things up.

The asking tool has 5 levels of intensity. You’ve probably seen them all:

These are not 5 things. These are the same exact tool used at 5 levels of temperature.

And this is why many leaders will think, “We’ve tried everything,” when, in fact, they’ve only tried one thing 5 ways.

Now, what does the asking tool actually do?

There’s an even better question to ask: Which level are most of the leaders around you on right now?

Probably not 1. Or 2. Or even 3.

So what does that mean the asking tool does, in reality? It helps us get to the next temperature of the asking tool. What it doesn’t do most of the time is get us the thing we’re asking for.

This is what normal looks like.

Then What About “Modeling” Behavior?

The high-integrity leader out there has a theory. That asking alone is not enough. As a high-integrity leader, I should show my people what great looks like instead of telling or asking.

Modeling is a significant upgrade to asking. But there’s a reason we’re talking about this here instead of in the “What Great Looks Like” section.

Modeling still fails most of the time. (Just look at the real world results of it).

Why? For two reasons.

First, modeling is usually personality-based. A person with the kind of personality that is highly organized, focused, productive, assertive, and jumps right into things thinks that they are modeling when they’re just being themselves. And they think other people will stop being themselves when they see an example.

That is like Jordan thinking he is modeling when he dunks from the free-throw line.

“Now you do it.”

Right.

It’s a nice idea that anyone can have the same drive, focus, intensity, and optimism as you. But that is false. Biologically false. And that’s why, in the real world, people mostly keep being themselves, even when there’s a shining example of how to be someone else.

Second, while modeling is high-integrity, it’s still passive. It’s the hope that your demonstration will bring “organizational osmosis” to life as behavior gets naturally absorbed by other people and teams.

Sadly, there is no organizational osmosis. That’s not really a thing. And it’s definitely not a reliable strategy.

Don't get me wrong. Modeling helps. It’s a lot better than being a total hypocrite. But it isn’t highly causal of success. If we want greatness, we need to cause it, not model it.

Greatness doesn’t try to speak greatness into existence. It designs for it.

Let’s get back to that word phenomenology.

Here’s a test. Think for a moment about this question. Like, actually think about it:

How, exactly, will your team get faster?

Here’s what probably just happened in your brain:

That depth is where we need to go from the beginning. That’s what great looks like. Those first two steps aren’t a great look, and they are entirely acausal of success.

What you’ll notice about things like speed, accountability, grit, and more is that it’s physically impossible to think about them or talk about them for more than 10 seconds before realizing these phenomena aren’t the real substance. You can’t deliver a 30 minute talk on speed. It’s not possible.

Sure, you can talk about how important it is for a few minutes, and then you can talk for 27 more minutes about examples of fast people and teams, but that’s only staying on the outside of the topic. Eventually, you have to talk about how speed actually happens and that’ll take you away from the topic of speed into a set of sharper topics that cause speed, explain where it comes from, and unveil how, precisely, we can bring it about.

2-3 minutes in, you won’t be talking about the mirage of speed itself any more. You’ll be talking about the logic and substance of real things that create the mirage.

Phenomenon words like speed have no interior. They are just shells. Greatness knows this. And that’s why greatness always focuses on 3 things normal teams never focus on.

Let’s do a quick demo of this for those of you who want speed.

Primitives

In intellectual work, humans do not ever simply move faster, type faster, talk faster, think faster, present faster, and decide faster. Humans change deeper stuff that then makes them appear faster. Specifically, they only change 3 things:

That’s it. There is no speed. There are only these 3 ingredients of speed. Every fast thing is explained by this. Every slow thing is explained by this. Zero exceptions.

Designing an Environment

Have you noticed that the strategy of “no meeting Thursdays” works, but “go faster” doesn’t? That’s because “no meeting Thursdays” addresses a primitive.

Have you noticed that 20% time at Google drove innovation, but a “Be Innovative” value doesn’t? That’s because giving people 20% of their time to innovate is a primitive, and a word on a wall isn’t.

Primitives work. Once you know what the primitives are, you can stop barking about the effect (go faster) and design for the cause. Here’s the exact way we will increase the number of hours that people are focused. Here’s the exact way we will help people select what to focus on. Here’s the exact way we will develop competence. Those are concrete things, working on the primitives, driving real world speed.

Recognizing and Reinforcing

Once you are driving real success with primitives and design, you will naturally focus on the inputs that we can directly control, not the outcomes we can’t. Fast teams don’t talk about speed. Accountable teams don’t talk about accountability. They protect the primitives, instead. When recognizing and reinforcing, the words are about the primitives, themselves. This team’s focus is insane. We picked all of the right things to focus on and to ignore. We had gaps in our skillset, closed them, and things instantly came to life.

The Gap Between Asking and Design

The greats recognize that there is nothing more hypocritical and counterproductive than a big difference between their words and their environment.

I have worked with hundreds of businesses, from FAANG to main street, helping them operate better, use data better, build cultures, make products people love, and more. Almost universally, the environment is fighting the words. The environment is inherently slow and the leaders are asking for speed. To the average person on the team, this reads as “You designed a place to be slow, and then you want us to be fast.”

Our tools are slow. Our process is slow. Our data is messed up. Our expedience in the past means things are janky. It takes me a week to get answers from our data people. The team blames leadership for designing an inherently slow environment, and it takes a pretty big act of boldness (or psychopathy) to ask for speed in an environment designed for slow. Or similarly, to ask for accountability in an environment designed for blame and heads rolling. Etc.

Greatness means the gap between Asking and Design is being actively managed, fixed, and eliminated.

This doesn’t mean perfection. It just means answering a simple question: What are we actually doing right now to create the phenomena? Simply having a concrete, primitives-based answer is all it takes for the team to know they are around greatness, and that we’ll be a better team tomorrow than we are today.

On Friday, we’ll dive into the exact primitives of two things: Speed and Accountability. And if there’s time for a third, I’ll ask you in the audience to suggest a phenomenon you want to bring to life. For each, we’ll cover:

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