Organizations invest heavily in motivating employees and improving performance, but William N. Martin argues they may be asking the wrong question. Instead of demanding more from individuals, Martin says leaders should first examine the conditions surrounding them. "We strive for outcomes when we should be looking at conditions," Martin said. His conclusion comes from decades in environments where performance had consequences far beyond quarterly reports: as a utility lineman, flight nurse paramedic, ski patrol member, and mountain rescuer trained in crevasse and avalanche rescue.
One emergency involving an 11-year-old girl who suffered a traumatic amputation of her leg at the knee crystallized his thinking. Inside the ambulance, capable emergency personnel worked under extreme intensity. Martin did not tell anyone to calm down. He asked clinical questions: What was her blood pressure? What had already been done? Why was a second tourniquet being used? The deliberate manner of his questioning changed 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, the girl's mother was overwhelmed. Her husband could not accompany her, and she faced a long drive to the trauma center while her daughter was flown by helicopter. Martin handed the mother his phone and asked her to call herself, explaining he wanted her number to stay in contact during the flight. He told her her daughter was being cared for and that he could not yet know whether doctors could save her leg. What he gave her was a role: 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. For Martin, the patient's support system is part of the calculus of the patient's outcome.
That distinction became central to how Martin thinks about human behavior beyond emergency medicine. He questions the tendency to assume poor performance means a person lacks motivation, ability, or commitment. Before trying to change the individual, he believes leaders, educators, and parents should first 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?"
Martin often illustrates the idea with two seeds: a sunflower seed and a corn seed. Each contains different genetic information, and neither needs to be taught what it is capable of becoming. What matters is whether it encounters the right conditions. "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." Throw those same seeds randomly out a window, and their future depends on where they land. The potential inside them has not changed; the conditions surrounding them have.
For Martin, that analogy applies to people. An organization 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, Martin argues, misses part of the problem.
His 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 has become increasingly important as Martin thinks about younger generations and a future that will present 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 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, but other times the conditions 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?
