Organizations invest heavily in improving outcomes, teaching leaders to motivate, increase accountability, and extract more from employees. But William N. Martin suggests that this approach may be misguided. "We strive for outcomes when we should be looking at conditions," Martin said. His decades of experience as a utility lineman, flight nurse paramedic, ski patrol member, and mountain rescuer have shaped his belief that the conditions surrounding individuals often matter more than direct demands for performance.
One emergency involving an 11-year-old girl with a traumatic leg amputation illustrates his point. Entering the ambulance, Martin found capable personnel working under extreme intensity. Instead of telling them to calm down, he asked clinical questions about blood pressure, prior actions, and tourniquet use. The atmosphere shifted. "The people in that ambulance knew what they were doing," Martin said. "What I could do was change the condition we were operating in." Outside, the girl's mother was overwhelmed. Martin handed her his phone and asked her to call herself, explaining he wanted her number to stay in contact during the flight. He gave her a role: get to the hospital safely because her daughter would need her. The circumstances hadn't changed, but the mother now had something to do. For Martin, the patient's support system is part of the calculus of the patient's outcome.
Martin questions the tendency to assume poor performance means a lack of motivation or ability. Before trying to change the individual, he believes leaders, educators, and parents should examine the conditions surrounding that person. "What conditions have we allowed to persist?" Martin said. "Are we giving somebody the ability to think and make decisions, or are the conditions around them teaching them to simply wait for someone else to tell them what to do?" The distinction matters because environments are rarely the product of one person or one decision. Some conditions are inherited, others develop gradually, and some are influenced by circumstances outside anyone's control. For Martin, becoming aware of those conditions may be more useful than assigning blame.
Martin often illustrates the idea with two seeds: a sunflower seed and a corn seed. They differ in appearance and genetic information, yet neither needs to be taught what it is capable of becoming. "You put the seed in the appropriate soil. It needs water. It needs sunlight. There are conditions that allow what's already in that seed to emerge," Martin said. "I didn't create the potential in the seed. It was already there." But throw those seeds randomly out a window, and their future depends on where they land. The potential inside them hasn't changed; the conditions have. For Martin, that analogy applies to people. An organization can recruit talented employees and still have an environment where people become afraid to make decisions. A leader can ask for initiative while unintentionally rewarding conformity. Parents can want independent children while making every important decision for them. None of those outcomes necessarily begins with bad intentions, but demanding a different outcome without examining conditions misses part of the problem.
Martin's interest is not in removing difficulty. He says human beings are adaptive, and difficult circumstances can reveal extraordinary capability. But there is a difference between conditions that allow people to adapt and conditions that gradually teach them to surrender their agency. That distinction has become increasingly important as he thinks about younger generations facing problems their parents and grandparents cannot anticipate. "I don't know what problems the next generation is going to have to solve because some of those problems haven't even been invented yet," Martin said. "So giving them all of my answers isn't the answer. They need to be able to think, adapt, connect with other people and make decisions." For Martin, that changes the responsibility of leadership. "Profit and performance are lagging indicators of the quality of our decisions," Martin said. If that is true, leaders may need to spend less time demanding better outcomes and more time understanding the conditions under which those decisions are being made. Sometimes the obstacle is the individual. Other times, the conditions surrounding that person deserve a closer look. "We talk a lot about releasing human potential," Martin said. "I don't believe I can create somebody else's potential. What I can do is contribute to conditions that either allow it to emerge or help suppress it." That leaves leaders with a question Martin believes is worth asking before demanding the next outcome: What are we allowing to grow?
