For fifteen years I watched good people get blamed for problems they didn’t create.
In short: Breaking The Loop was founded by Graeme Colville, who spent fifteen years in contact centre and claims operations, including senior roles inside one of the UK's largest insurance companies. It helps leaders see that poor performance is usually a design problem, not a people problem, and gives them a practical way to change it.
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I kept seeing the same thing. A team labelled as underperforming, when the truth was that the design around them made good performance almost impossible. The target that punished the right instinct. The system that hid what they needed. The rule that added the step. And every time, the fix aimed at the people, and every time, it faded.
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Breaking The Loop exists to end that pattern: to help leaders see that the problem is almost always the design, not the people, and to give them a way to change it.
The belief underneath it
Performance is designed, not demanded. You are not alone in this, and you are not the problem, you've most likely just been unsupported, handed the pressure without the means to change what's actually producing it. That's the gap this closes.
Where I come from
Fifteen years in contact centre and claims operations, including senior roles in Canada and the UK. Certified in change management through Prosci, and trained in the Vanguard Method of systems thinking. The frameworks matter less than what they're for: taking the blame off people, and putting the attention on the design that's actually producing the result.
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That's what Performance Design is built around. The Rope is the model of a leader stretched between how performance gets designed above them and the frontline delivering it below, whose job is to route tension between the two rather than transmit or absorb it
The proof it works
Aimed at the design instead of the people, inside one of Canada's largest insurers: redesigned the operating model to remove seventeen FTE's worth of manual, low-value work. Work, not people. The team was already doing customer-facing work. They just got the time back to actually do it. Every key measure held or improved throughout.
That's Performance Design, and The Rope is the model underneath it. Read the whole method →