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What's the Zone of Peak Performance?

Presentations, Seminars, and Workshops

What's the Zone of Peak Performance?

A 1-2 hour presentation.

What are the qualities of peak performance in the workplace? Are there some shared values--not just common goals--that would naturally motivate people in any organization? What if we look for answers to these questions in the experience of geniuses and mystics as well as highly effective businesspeople?

Dr. Steve Randall will present a twelve-facet vision of peak performance drawn from experiential reports of geniuses and mystics. A handout of twelve sets of quotes will provide a comprehensive picture of a cross-cultural, shared vision of self-actualization. This vision can provide the foundation for continuous improvement and managing by values, no matter what the organizational mission. It can also serve as the hub integrating Senge's five disciplines.

This presentation can help you learn:

  • The importance of the 'zone' for productivity and well-being
  • The qualities of peak performance in the workplace--shared values that naturally motivate people in any organization
  • Why the zone of peak performance can't be defined in terms of organizational structures, management styles, employee habits, and best practices or processes
  • Descriptions (from peak performance literature) of twelve dimensions of the zone so that you can more easily recognize the zone when you're in it
  • A vision to use as your foundation for managing by values, no matter what the organizational mission
  • How continuous improvement can be defined in terms of the zone

Highlights and Key Points:

Why develop a vision of optimal work?

  • Unless we have an idea of what optimal work is, we'll have difficulty doing it.
  • Most of what can be found in the literature of business, peak performance, and psychology is of limited scope. A lot of what is written deals with specifics--organizational structures, management styles, employee habits, and best practices or processes. These specifics limited applicability. Other writings in the literature address only a limited range of human experience.
  • If we have a clear vision of peak performance in the workplace, we'll have a natural meeting ground for personal values and corporate goals that will foster self-sustaining motivation on the part of the employee, gradually relieving management of the need to motivate employees, and decreasing the friction commonly experienced between employees and management.

Unlike other sources of motivation . . . self-actualization continues to motivate people to ever higher levels of performance. (pp. 163-4, Andrew Grove, HOM)    Our role as managers is . . . to . . . bring them to the point where self-actualization motivates them. (p. 168)

Is there a balanced, general vision of optimal work? If so, it should probably balance productivity, quality, well-being. And if it's general, applicable to any person, environment, and task, it cannot be defined in terms of specific things, processes, or styles.

If a vision didn't tell us specifically what to do, perhaps it would tell us how to work best. Perhaps perspectives, frames of mind, world-views, & qualities of experience can define vision.

In peak performance we move toward the 'zone' (see the diagram above), which can be broken into twelve dimensions:

  1. Flow
    • [golfer Bobby Jones:] I had to make no special effort to do anything. (p. 86, ITZ)
    • He is no longer wasting effort fighting and restraining himself; muscles are no longer fighting muscles. (Maslow, TPB, p. 105-6)
  2. Creativity
    • We are not creatures, products of Space and Time. . . . We are all being newly born within Space and Time, second by second. (p. 300, Tarthang Tulku, TSK)
  3. Accomplishment
    • The person in the peak-experiences usually feels himself to be at the peak of his powers, using all his capacities at the best and fullest. . . . He is at his best . . . . This is not only felt subjectively but can be seen by the observer. (pp. 105-6, TPB)
    • The more eager we are to make a diagnosis and a plan of action, the less helpful do we become. The more eager we are to cure, the longer it takes. (pp. 184, TPB)
  4. Objective Space
    • [golfer Jack Fleck:] As I looked at the putt, the hole looked as big as a wash tub. (p. 38, In the Zone, Murphy)
    • Everything is made of emptiness and form is condensed emptiness. (Einstein)
  5. Mental Space
    • He is more able to fuse with the world, with what was formerly not-self, e.g., the lovers come closer to forming a unit rather than two people, . . . the creator becomes one with his work being created, . . . the appreciator becomes the music . . . . (p. 105, TPB)
    • We completely transcend a self-centered orientation and become fully with everyone and everything else. Locations and attitudes, problems and confusions, no longer bind us. (p. 113-114, TSK)
  6. Identity
    • [When judo is practiced properly,] You will become one with him. You and your opponent will no longer be two bodies separated physically from each other but a single entity . . . . (p. 32, ITZ)
    • [auto racer Jimmy Clark:] The car happens to be under me and I'm controlling it, but it's as much a part of me as I am of it. (p. 32, ITZ)
  7. Locus of Knowing
    • We can develop a mode of 'seeing' which is not limited to a particular position or 'point of view' at all. (p. 27, TSK)
  8. Content of Knowing
    • It is not simply a content of knowledge, for it involves no sense of a subject-object duality. (p. 219, TSK)
    • [Soccer player Pelé:] Intuitively, at any instant, he seemed to know the position of all the other players on the field, and to sense just what each man was going to do next. (p. 38, ITZ)
    • It is not a meaning....It is unlearned or nonlearned learnedness. (p. 253, TSK)
  9. Well-being
    • [climber Rob Schultheis:] I felt . . . bliss, a joy beyond comprehension . . . a feeling that all ills were healed, everything was all right, always had been, really, and always would be. There was nothing wanting in all of creation. (p. 124, ITZ)
  10. Need and Fulfillment
    • Fulfillment is available within all situations, thoughts, and emotions, whether convention labels them as 'positive' or 'negative'. (p. 271, TSK)
    • We participate in an uncontrived intimacy. We are also absolutely self-sufficient in a nonegoistic sense. We can draw nourishment and energy directly from our own being, directly from Space and Time. (p. 287, TSK)
  11. Feeling of Time
    • [football player John Brodie:] Time seems to slow way down . . . . It seems as if I had all the time in the world . . . and yet I know the defensive line is coming at me just as fast as ever. (p. 42, ITZ)
    • [Tom Seaver:] As Rod Gaspar's front foot stretched out and touched home plate, in the fraction of a second before I leaped out of the dugout . . . my whole baseball life flashed in front of me . . . . (p. 47, ITZ)
    • There is a common experience in Tai Chi . . . . Awareness of the passage of time completely stops. (p. 47, ITZ)
    • Without confirming division, it [time] allows for the conceptual separation into past and present and future. (p. 162, DTS)
  12. Feeling of Reality
    • [Charles Lindbergh:] All sense of substance leaves. There's no longer weight to my body, no longer hardness to the stick. The feeling of flesh is gone. (p. 116, ITZ)
    • [runner Ian Jackson:] My body seemed insubstantial like some ethereal vehicle of awareness. (p. 135, ITZ)

How can these ideas about peak experience be applied to the workplace? Let me ask a question: Where's the best place to focus when you hit a tennis ball? On your scorecard? No, on the way you hit the ball. You try to get completely involved, actually experiencing the central qualities we've identified.

Being primarily task-oriented can lead us to burn out or do meaningless things. The optimal way to work is to marry values or valued experiential qualities with our activities.

When people are in the zone, all of their attention is on what they're doing . . . . The results just seem to flow from this focus of energy . . . . Lots of companies seem to watch only their scoreboard-the bottom line. In doing so, they take their eyes off the ball . . . . That gets them out of the zone and invites long-term disaster. (p. 3, Managing By Values, by Ken Blanchard)

So the best way to drive progress is to focus on increasing involvement (see What Guarantees Optimal Productivity and Well-Being?), not the scorecard. This means seeking the deeper values of the 'zone'. And the deeper values we focus on, the better. By doing this, we manage by values.

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