Organizations invest heavily in improving outcomes through motivation, accountability and performance management. But for William N. Martin, those efforts may be starting with the wrong question. "We strive for outcomes when we should be looking at conditions," Martin said, arguing that greater human potential is more likely to emerge when leaders examine the environment around people rather than simply demanding more from them.
Martin's perspective is grounded in decades of work where performance had consequences far beyond quarterly reports. He has served as a utility lineman, flight nurse paramedic, ski patrol member and mountain rescuer, with training in crevasse rescue for glacier travel and avalanche rescue. Those roles placed him alongside people making decisions under extreme pressure, sometimes when a life depended on what happened next.
One such incident involved an 11-year-old girl who had suffered a traumatic amputation of her leg at the knee. Entering the ambulance, Martin found capable emergency personnel working on her, but the intensity inside was extremely high. Rather than telling anyone to calm down, he began asking clinical questions: What was her blood pressure? What had already been done? Why was a second tourniquet being used? The deliberate manner of his questions shifted the atmosphere. "The people in that ambulance knew what they were doing," Martin said. "I didn't need to come in and tell them how to do their jobs. What I could do was change the condition we were operating in."
Outside, another problem was unfolding. The girl's mother was overwhelmed, facing a long drive to the trauma center while her daughter would be transported by helicopter. Martin handed the mother his phone and asked her to call herself, explaining he wanted her number so he could stay in contact. He would text from the helicopter and call when they reached the hospital. He told her that her daughter was being cared for and that he could not yet know whether doctors could save her leg, but he could give the mother a role: her job was to get to the hospital safely because her daughter would need her. The circumstances had not changed, but the mother now had something she could do.
That distinction became central to Martin's thinking about human behavior well beyond emergency medicine. He questions the tendency to assume poor performance automatically means a person lacks motivation, ability or commitment. Before trying to change the individual, he believes leaders, educators and even parents should first examine surrounding conditions. "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?"
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." Thrown randomly out a window, however, their future depends on where they land. The potential inside them has not changed; the conditions surrounding them have.
For organizations, that analogy is instructive. A company can recruit talented employees and still create 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 the surrounding conditions misses part of the problem.
Martin's interest is not in removing difficulty. Human beings are adaptive, he says, 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 matters increasingly as he considers 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," he said. If true, leaders may need to spend less time demanding better outcomes and more time understanding the conditions under which decisions are 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?
