Welcome to the World of Performance

Delivering Complete Work is the key to performance. A simple example:

An engineer has finished a feature as intended and has tested it locally. While a milestone in and of itself, this is not Complete Work. To understand the distinction, you have to go back to what the original intention of this work was — and was not.

The intention was not the technical completion of the feature itself, even if that part was done to the reviewer's full satisfaction. The actual intention was to get this new feature into the hands of a customer, working as expected.

Complete Work is the completion of a task as it was intended — as distinct from how it was communicated — finished from beginning to end. In our example: documentation completed, marketing having received all required information, sales people properly trained, the feature rolled out in production with the necessary monitoring in place, and finally one (1) customer brought on and now using the new feature successfully.

That is Complete Work.

A key tool that demonstrates Complete Work is a burndown list equipped with clear Intentions, Demonstrated By's, and By Whens. Learn more →

A key tenet of performance is Ownership.

Ownership is the quality of owning the related Burn Down List — a complete ledger of all required tasks to be completed. Said differently: having total command over a specific task, from beginning to end, so that if there are any questions about it, you are able to give a concrete, concise answer (or able to get that answer with velocity).

When you find yourself diverting questions or feeling stuck in any way, those are most often indicators that you are not owning the specific task as it was intended.

Ownership does not mean that you are doing all of the required tasks yourself — to the contrary. Your performance is critically tied to being able to use available company resources and to lead your peers to the completion of your owned Burn Down List.

Demonstrated By is one of the most powerful distinctions of Performance Culture. Once mastered, it will transform how you see not just the work you do, but how you see the world in general. In essence, a Demonstrated By tethers you to the ground of reality.

Here's what we mean by that. In any given project there are a myriad of intentions and goals one pursues:

“We want to be the #1 brand in the data world.”

Of course this is an ambitious goal, and one probably everyone in the company would agree is worth pursuing. But what does it actually mean? If we were on a call with, say, 10 leaders from our company, do all 10 have the same idea in mind?

Of course not.

Any intention that has been aligned on, on any level, primarily exists in an ambiguous “thought-state” until tethered to the ground of reality by one or more Demonstrated By's. In this example, they might look like this:

1. When searching on Google for decisioning data, we consistently show up as the #1 non-paid result.
2. When asking an AI for help retrieving data for decisioning, our APIs are consistently in the top 3 response bullet points for GPT, Claude and Gemini.
3. When speaking to any underwriting specialist at Money20/20 and asking for the top data companies, we are reliably (80%+) the first data provider mentioned.

You might disagree about the perfect Demonstrated By's — but notice how they transform an amorphous something into a result concretely recognizable in reality. True success is measurable; the Demonstrated By is a tool of power to discover and communicate the success criteria of your work.

Think about it: what would unambiguously demonstrate that you have delivered on the intended outcome — that you delivered Complete Work? That is your Demonstrated By.

By When is a powerful communication tool that creates a reliable foundation for performance. A communication without a By When is just chatter (“I'll get back to you asap!”). A communication with a clear By When opens the door to a different level of performance (“I'll get back to you by 5pm tomorrow.”).

Once a By When has been delivered, the recipient can use it as a reliable building block to build on top of, or as the moment to follow up. A committed communication with a By When helps keep what needs to get done in reality — e.g. on a calendar.

Consider that a highly effective organization is held together by a highly reliable network of By When's — its organizational commitments.

And consider that, as humans, we are fallible. Missing a By When is not in and of itself an issue — but failing to communicate an updated, revised or revoked By When will reliably reduce organizational performance.

Most companies will provide you with a range of project management tools.

→ Here, all you get is a sheet of paper.

Compared to the other points in this document, this might look like a ridiculous distinction to add. The Burndown List finds its adjacent origins in the burndown chart generally found in the Agile project-management community — a visual graph showing remaining work versus time.

The Burndown List is a fancy name for a sheet of paper outlining the critical tasks needed to get from Point A (where we are now) to Point B (where we intend to be). It is fundamental in its nature — in the world of performance, in the world of accomplishing anything.

Please do not step over this fact. Make sure you fully grasp — discover for yourself — that this is so.

Qualification is the enemy of performance. We often wait to feel qualified — one more certification, one more year of experience, one more sign-off — before we act, lead or decide. That waiting is a quiet form of permission-seeking, and it caps performance long before any real limit does.

The distinction is to notice when “I'm not qualified yet” is running the show, and to choose ownership and action over credentials. Qualification follows performance: you earn it by delivering Complete Work and owning outcomes, not by collecting permissions in advance.

This does not mean acting recklessly or skipping genuine skill-building. It means refusing to let the feeling of being under-qualified become the reason nothing ships.

Intentional Communication

You might have heard the old saying: “Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.” Intentional Communication is a special form of communication. Instead of saying “Can I build a new pricing structure for this product?” consider saying:

“I intend to build a new pricing structure for this product. The reason is […]. Once ready, I will brief Product, Sales and Finance and will report back here with next steps.”

This is the opposite of operating from a position of seeking approval — a “lean back,” passive approach — to a lean-forward, active position. It is the practice of speaking your intention clearly and giving the team an opportunity to chime in where needed. You are never blocked.

Effective Communication

Effective Communication is the practice of communicating in such a way that the intended message lands with its intended recipient.

You sending a message is not communication. You saying something on a call is not communication. Only once your communication has been heard and acknowledged, as intended, was the communication effective.

If this sounds very similar to Complete Work — you're right. It is in the same vein. The best way to let someone know their communication was properly received is to “recreate” it in your own words (“So if I understood you correctly, you are saying […]”) with the sender responding with a variant of “That's right.”

Keep in mind that all the basics of Respectful Communication — being clear, honest and polite, and avoiding language that is rude, aggressive or judgmental — apply here as they do anywhere.

Complete Communication

Complete Communication closes the loop. Intentional Communication opens it (you state your intention); Effective Communication lands it (it is heard as intended); Complete Communication confirms it — both sides leave with the same, explicit next step, a clear owner and a By When. A communication is only complete when nothing critical is left implicit and there is an agreed action on the other side.

Nothing happens without alignment; nothing happens without enrollment. It is your job to get alignment from your peers, your leaders and those who report to you. Any change, adjustment, new invention or product — they all require enrollment, from those around you and from your clients.

Communicating in such a way that they discover, for themselves, that what you are proposing will benefit them — or support them or their organizations in fulfilling their own intentions — is a key component of an enrollment conversation. Another is acknowledging and dealing with considerations, concerns and disagreements.

Often it is not necessary for everyone to end up with the same conclusion. What is required is acknowledging these considerations, concerns and disagreements. Once the conversation is complete, a commitment is made by everyone: the next steps to take are clear to all.

Important: an aligned commitment is not necessarily a compromise. And, most importantly, “disagree yet commit” promotes action over paralysis. We all have to be able to disagree, yet still commit.

Note: using “Force” is always an available tool in a leader's toolbox. Using “Force” often, however, is an indicator of underdeveloped leadership skills.

Symptoms have a gravitational pull. Often, when we encounter issues, the natural reflex is to get in there — engaged, enthralled with the symptoms — and patch them up. Our CRM is missing the right Customer IDs every few records? Let's set aside a recurring time to correct those! It certainly sounds like that makes sense. A little later, this procedure has become part of our Standard Operating Procedures.

The key to performance is to recognize when we are engaged with the symptoms and not dealing with the systems causing them. There is no recipe for this; it is a practice. Taking a step back and distinguishing the symptoms from their root causes takes courage, and often requires engaging deeply with the subject matter.

Good indicators: noticing when manual tasks are being repeated without questioning, and repeated inconsistencies occurring seemingly at random (which often have become a part of everyday life).

Keep in mind that there are indeed times when the best decision is to treat the symptoms. Turning that reflex into a conscious and communicated choice is the hallmark of good leadership.

Proper tooling is a force multiplier. Just as levers allow us to lift weights that are otherwise impossible to move, software tools allow us to deliver performance far beyond what would have been possible without them.

As such, a major unlock is available through the mastery of the tool. When you are concerned about performance, the choosing, setting up and using of your tools-of-the-craft will have an outsized impact on you, your team and your peers' performance.

Own your tools. Master them. Refine them — often you will know these better than those who built them.

Performance only exists in the realm of measurement. There is no performance without measurement.

Measurement often carries a connotation of getting trapped, of being monitored or controlled. But in the world of performance, the scoreboard determines success or failure — whether on the sports grounds or in organizations. Finding the right metrics is mostly a science, and sometimes an art.

Support your Demonstrated By work — “what would unambiguously demonstrate that you have delivered on the intended outcome?” — by developing the skill to create the appropriate OKRs and/or KPIs that really reflect you hitting the mark. Know whether you are progressing, stalling or regressing toward what you are out to achieve. Build a strong, productive relationship with your metrics.

The right metrics are often uncomfortable at the beginning, and our natural instinct is to shy away from them, as they are effectively “telling on ourselves.”

Here a leadership decision is needed: what are you more committed to — the “looking good,” or the delivery of extraordinary performance? Understand that all leaders here are clear that early metrics, more often than not, look terrible — and that the key is to measure what's so, and increase performance together.

As leaders, our job is to manage work and get it to completion — establishing a well-run machinery that delivers consistent, predictable and appropriate results.

We are asked to go beyond that. While the above is critically important, we expect our leaders to reliably carve out time for what we call 10x Projects.

These projects are self-discovered and self-ushered to completion, taken on to deliver outsized wins for the organization. While there are no recipes for them, 10x Projects have a clear reason for why they are 10x. For example, they create: 10x revenue growth, 10x efficiency in how we activate customers, or a 10x difference in compute costs. In short — 10x Projects have outcomes that are inarguably 10x.

What there is a recipe for is creating the appropriate structure for yourself to have the time to engage with the question: “What would deliver a 10x move, improvement, increase or decrease in my area of expertise, or generally?”

Outsized wins come from outsized commitments — big goals — and outsized efforts to make those goals a reality.

“Consider that all accomplishment is constituted by a series of resolved breakdowns.”

A breakdown is an opportunity for a breakthrough. There are generally two types that interest us: Breakdowns with People and Breakdowns with Systems. Regardless of type, leaders are adamant about dealing with them quickly. Unresolved issues lingering in the background are a sure way to reduce an organization's potential for performance.

There's a specific view on breakdowns we've discovered to be particularly useful: viewing them as inherently not personal — “they” are not out to get you — is extremely empowering. Breakdowns are just things that are in the way of us achieving what we want to achieve. Nothing more, nothing less.

Breakdowns with Systems

These are often systemic in nature — recall the difference between fixing the symptoms versus the systems. A system's breakdown can usually be resolved in a mostly mechanical way: a Burndown List is generated with the required steps for resolution, and the plan is executed.

A key aspect of an outstanding leader is that they design systems following our “If it breaks, will you notice?” principle — systems that raise their issues before anyone else notices.

Breakdowns with People

While this is the last section of the document, it might as well have been the first. Breakdowns with people — your peers — are an inevitable part of your experience here, and frankly of life in general.

Somebody promised to get something done by a certain date and did not. You shared your vision for the next steps and somebody thinks it's a terrible idea. You promised to get something done and did not — worse, you didn't want to communicate it because you really thought you'd make the deadline. Somebody bypassed you as team lead and is commandeering your direct report. There are endless opportunities to “F things up,” and we all do it.

What differentiates a great leader is how they deal with breakdowns. Breakdowns are never really about you and me; seeing them as truly un-personal is a key skill to develop and practice — especially with Breakdowns with People.

Here's why. Just as our ancestors heard rustling in the bushes and assumed a predator was about to pounce, we tend to see hidden meaning and agenda in the things that happen around us. This tendency runs against Hanlon's Razor. Frank didn't submit his work in time? He's out to get me. Mike sent some rude Slack messages? He's forcing a reaction to get his way. These interpretations might have lots of support — but they have one thing in common: they stand in the way of performance.

We pride ourselves on having picked great folks to work with, and we are fundamentally clear that all of our people are here to deliver their best work. Focusing on the people involved in a breakdown — their possible motivations and intentions — means going down an unproductive rabbit hole that diverts from the core question:

What actions — now — would resolve the breakdown?