You keep trying to fix performance. It keeps coming back.
You've coached, retrained, reset the targets, run the project. It moves, then it drifts back to where it always sat. And underneath the tiredness is a quieter thought: maybe it can't be fixed. Maybe it's you.
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It isn't. It's the design. And the design can be changed.
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In short: Breaking The Loop is a leadership practice for service organizations. Performance problems keep coming back because improvement is aimed at the people, when the results are produced by the system's design. Change the design and the result changes. Coach the people and it drifts back.
Ten minutes on your own work, and it shows you where to start
Performance is designed, not demanded.
The results you're getting aren't a measure of how hard your people try, or how well you lead. They're what the current design produces, on purpose, every time. Which is the good news hiding in the bad: change the design, and you change the result, without asking anyone to care more or try harder than they already do.
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Most improvement fails because it's aimed at the people. This is aimed at the thing actually producing the problem.
Where you are decides where you start
Three practices, one path. You start where your problem is.
You lead a team, and you can't tell what's really wrong.
Stop guessing, second-guessing, and trying one more tactic. Go and see the work as it really happens, uncover what is quietly creating the pressure, and leave with a clearer next step you can act on.
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What changes:
You stop wondering whether you are the problem and start seeing what is actually producing it.
You fixed it, and now it depends on you.
Redesign the conditions creating the pressure so the same problems stop returning, your team has room to succeed, and improvement holds when things get busy again.
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What changes:
Less firefighting. Fewer recurring problems. More confidence that the fix will last.
Stop being the only person who can carry it
Develop the internal capability to help other leaders diagnose and redesign their own systems, so the method does not depend on your constant presence.
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What changes:
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The capability stops living in one person. Other leaders learn to see, redesign, and carry the work forward.
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Not sure which is you? Â
Find Your Loop - ten minutes on your own operation, and it points you to the right place.
You’ll know the loop when you see it.
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Target slips
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Push harder
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The problem returns
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It improves briefly
You can’t coach your way out of a system that is built to produce the problem.
Graeme Colville
Founder of Breaking The Loop
Proof it works
This isn't theory. At one of the UK's largest insurers, aiming at the design instead of the people took a contact centre operation's first-contact resolution from 9% to 21%, removed 9,000 unnecessary emails a month, and cut a 25% chunk of avoidable calls, the work that should never have existed in the first place.
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After twenty years inside contact centres and claims operations, watching good people get blamed for problems the design created, I decided to create Breaking The Loop to end that.
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You don't end up with a binder or set of slides with recommendations. You end up with the capability to do it yourself. And capability doesn't leave once the consultant does.
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Whether it's a team of six or six hundred, healthcare, government, financial services, or telecoms, the principle holds: anywhere good people are asked to succeed inside a system that makes it hard, the way out is the same.
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Stop managing the numbers.
Find what's creating them.
Common questions
Because most fixes aim at the people, and the people were never what produced the result. The design did. Coach harder and the number moves for a while, then drifts back, because nothing about the conditions producing it actually changed.
Operations. It's a practical, hands on method for redesigning the conditions producing your numbers, not a wellness programme, though the blame it removes from you is real too.
No. Learn to See is $195 CAD, most leaders expense it or pay themselves. Fix It is built to run on your own five to eight hours a week, not a business case you have to pitch upward first.
Some of what's blocking you will be yours to fix outright. Some will need someone else's buy-in. The method teaches you to tell the difference, and gives you evidence instead of opinion for the moments you need to make the case upward.