Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
When we encounter exceptional performance, we often try to reproduce it by identifying and standardizing the behaviors we can observe, without establishing whether those behaviors are what actually make the person effective. The Spanish concept of duende invites us to consider what may be lost when we attempt to replicate excellence without understanding the individual qualities and conditions that make it possible.
Duende (pronounced dwen-deh) is a Spanish word with a beautiful, layered meaning. At its deepest, duende is the mysterious power of art, music, or human expression to move us emotionally, sometimes beyond what we can explain.
The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca explored duende as a mysterious creative force, something that gives a performance an emotional power beyond technical proficiency. A singer may have a beautiful voice, exceptional training, and perfect control, yet leave an audience largely unmoved. Another singer, perhaps less technically accomplished, can deliver a performance that people remember for years. Something happens in the exchange between the performer and the audience that cannot be fully explained by technique.
There are parallels to this in how we recognize and experience excellence in other areas of life.
We recognize when someone is exceptionally good at what they do, but we cannot always explain precisely why. We can identify their knowledge, experience, preparation, and skills, yet these do not necessarily account for the full effect they have on the people around them.
And because we are inclined to understand excellence through the qualities we can observe and describe, we may overlook what is contributing most significantly to it.
When We Try to Reproduce Excellence
Consider what happens when an organization identifies someone whose performance is consistently exceptional. Naturally, there is interest in understanding what that person does differently so that others can achieve similar results. Their methods are studied, their behaviors documented, and their practices incorporated into training programmes, operating procedures, or performance standards.
There is considerable value in doing this. Knowledge should be shared, effective practices should be understood, and organizations should not become unnecessarily dependent on the capabilities of a few individuals.
However, this approach may rest on an assumption we have not fully considered. We may believe that once we have identified what an exceptional performer does, we have also understood what makes that person exceptional.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
A highly effective relationship manager, for example, may follow the same procedures, use the same systems, and have access to the same information as everyone else. Yet clients respond differently to that person. They trust their judgment, accept their recommendations, and feel understood in ways that extend beyond the formal requirements of the role.
We can observe how the relationship manager communicates, listens, and responds. We can even develop others in those capabilities. But reproducing the observable behaviors does not guarantee that we will reproduce the quality of the relationship.
The difference may involve a combination of judgment, temperament, experience, motivation, genuine interest, and an ability to recognize what a particular situation requires. Some of these qualities can be developed, but their effectiveness may depend on how they come together within the individual.
The Limits of Standardization
Organizations need standards. Without them, consistency becomes difficult, quality becomes unpredictable, and performance depends too heavily on individual discretion. The challenge is not standardization itself, but understanding what should be standardized and what should remain open to individual judgment and expression.
We sometimes design systems around the assumption that consistency requires people to behave in essentially the same way. We identify the behaviors associated with success and attempt to make them universal, without sufficiently examining whether those behaviors are the cause of the success or simply how success happens to be expressed through a particular person.
This can create an unintended consequence. In trying to reproduce exceptional performance, we may constrain the very qualities that allow different individuals to perform exceptionally.
A person who excels through thoughtful observation may be required to adopt the communication style of someone who succeeds through enthusiasm and spontaneity. A leader whose strength lies in creating space for others may be encouraged to become more visibly assertive because that is how another successful leader operates.
Neither approach is inherently superior. Their effectiveness depends on the individual, the people involved, and the circumstances in which they are applied.
The question, therefore, is not simply how we get more people to behave like our best performers. It is whether we understand the conditions that allow different people to contribute their best.
Understanding What Actually Creates Value
This brings me back to duende.
I would not suggest that organizations can or should attempt to cultivate duende as a management technique. That would almost defeat the point of the concept. What interests me is the reminder that the value of human contribution is not always fully explained by the elements we can isolate, measure, or reproduce.
We need to be careful about confusing what is visible with what is responsible for the result.
When something works exceptionally well, the temptation is to identify its most obvious characteristics and replicate them. But before doing so, we need to understand the relationship between those characteristics and the outcome. Are they essential to the result? Are they merely one person’s way of achieving it? Or is there something else contributing to the effectiveness that we have not yet recognized?
These questions become particularly important when organizations are designing roles, evaluating performance, developing talent, or introducing changes intended to improve results.
The objective should not always be to make exceptional performance more uniform. Sometimes it should be to understand what makes the performance possible, preserve what contributes to its effectiveness, and create the conditions in which others can achieve excellence through their own capabilities.
Duende may belong to the language of art, but it offers a useful reminder about the limits of our explanations. We can become so focused on identifying what people do that we fail to understand what makes their contribution valuable; and when we mistake the visible expression of excellence for its underlying source, we risk reproducing the form without reproducing the value.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
Where might you be attempting to replicate someone’s exceptional performance by copying what they do, without fully understanding what makes their contribution effective? And could that approach be preventing others from achieving equally valuable results in ways that are more natural to their own capabilities?
About Giselle
Some of the most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson, The Pre-Fixer™. I am asked to intervene when something important needs to be better understood before a consequential decision is made.
As The Pre-Fixer™, I act as a strategic thinking partner, working with leaders to examine what they are seeing, separate what they know from what they may be assuming, consider what else might explain the situation, and surface what may not yet be visible.
I don’t fix; I pre-fix. My work happens before the solution is chosen, helping leaders build the understanding from which better decisions can be made.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, business and the patterns that shape organizations, following the questions and observations that help us understand situations more clearly before deciding how to respond.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
