Greatest Leverage and Behavioral Engineering

Greatest Leverage refers to principles created by Thomas R. Gilbert who championed the idea of worthy performance and the Behavioral Engineering Model.

Simply put, the Behavioral Engineering Model shows how we can engineer behavioral changes if we identify specific factors involved in non-performance. Identifying these factors leads us to the most appropriate choices for interventions. For example, one area of performance shown below is capacity, which refers to the ability or inability of a person to perform in a specific manner. We cannot solve a capacity issue by conducting more and more training. A humorous example of this would be creating more and more training for our founder to run a 4 minute mile on a local track team. She ultimately lacks the capacity to run a 4 minute mile no matter how much training and conditioning we give her. Therefore, if we truly want to achieve a 4 minute mile for our track team, the correct intervention would be restaffing, not more training of the current staff. We'll have to recruit someone with the capacity to achieve this performance goal, and our founder will have to jog on back to her coaching role, which she's much better at.

Then, as with any investment, there is a point of greatest leverage or a point of diminishing returns. When we seek to improve business performance we must identify this critical point: highest level of performance return, for the lowest investment. This is worthy performance and the point of greatest leverage. This is how we achieve astounding performance increases, without breaking the bank.