Are high-performers real?

How do we reconcile exceptional individuals with systems thinking?

Systems thinking is a wholistic approach to understanding human behavior, performance and outcomes. It is a well-respected discipline that has led to, among other things, Human Centered Design.

One of the chief implications of systems thinking, is that outcomes and behaviors are influenced, limited, almost predetermined, by the systems themselves.

The literature is varied and vast. For instance, Nudge, a book written by a University of Chicago professor and Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and a Harvard Economist, Cass Sunstein explore the ways design can affect choice. In Design of Everyday Things, The patron saint of designers, Don Norman, shows with stunning every day examples the way design can affect behaviors. Cognitive Psychologist James Reason wrote a book about Human Error which gets even more technical but concludes with the same findings. In industry, the practices of system thinkers like W. Edwards Deming are still taught and practiced to this day. One thing is certain, both the academy and industry agree systems dictate outcomes.

But what to make of superstars? If systems dictate performance how is it possible that there exist such phenomenal outliers? Michael Phelps won 23 Gold Medals. Simone Biles performs gymnastics routines no other gymnast in the world dares to perform.

Outside of sports the same phenomena can be observed: there exist in every industry and profession high performers. They shine. They exceed expectations. They outperform their peers by significant margins. Their achievements are real and measurable. The critical question is not whether their performance is superior, but why their performance is superior. Understanding the source of their success doesn’t just allow us to awe at their performance, it helps us determine whether their achievements can be replicated and systematized. Whether their individual achievements can lead to broader improvement for everybody.

There are two fundamentally different kinds of high performers, and confusing them leads to misguided management strategies that can actually harm performance. It is the same conundrum of deciphering between common and special causes of performance.

Type one: the lucky stars

The first type of high performers are those who are simply fortunate. The stars have aligned in their favor. Perhaps its a sales person with an outstanding month. Their success is real and measurable, but it is not reproducible because it depends on circumstances beyond their control. It is simply the normal fluctuations of the system. To assign causality is to miss the point. Despite the rhetoric of grit and hustle and being a “good salesman”, their performance is circumstantial, bounded by the system. As the system changes, ebbs, flows so will their performance.

One tell-tale sign of this type of high performer is that their performance will still be commiserate to their peers. They may be on the top of the charts, but not in order of magnitudes greater than their peers. In sports, many hall of famers appear in this category. Most baseball players who hit for .300 over their career are hall of famers, but their performance is not orders of magnitude over their competition. Serena Williams is a highly decorated female tennis player. She holds several records, including most Grand Slam wins. But many of her other accomplishments are commiserate with other female tennis superstars; consider that both Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova hold more than double the WTA titles held by Serena.

Not understanding this leads to disfunctions at the organizational level. Many organizations find themselves trying to recapture lightning in a bottle which was never there to begin with. Another disfunction arises from actively making decisions, based on these successes. Promoting these lucky high performers into leadership positions, assuming that their success demonstrates capability. But if their performance was primarily due to favorable circumstances rather than superior methods or insights, the promotion is not merited. The organization is further mired in paradigm of tunnel vision, where every effect stems from an assignable cause.

Type two: the system hackers

The second kind of high performer is more interesting and more valuable. These are individuals who have figured out how to escape the system. They go off script in productive ways. They work around inefficiencies. They find better processes, circumvent bottlenecks, or build informal support networks. They are not succeeding because of the system as designed, but despite it . They have found ways to redesign their interaction with the system to work more effectively.

When they show up you know it, because they are in their own category. Michael Phelps has more Olympic medals than anybody else and it’s not even close. Wayne Gretzky racked up 2,857 points in his career. The next closest is Jaromir Jágr at almost a thousand less (1,921) despite playing in 128 more games.

These individuals represent a gold mine of organizational learning, because they represent a break from the status quo. They have discovered superior methods, conducted their own experiments, and proven that better performance is possible by doing things differently. Their innovations suggest how the system could be improved for everyone.

Learning from outliers

If you are a designer who wants to do more, change the status quo, lead others, or improve yourself you must learn to recognize this distinction and respond appropriately. The task is not to idolize these individuals or hold them up as an example for to emulate. Rather, your task is to study their methods systematically and understand what it is that allows them to perform well outside the typical constraints and limits of a system that binds everybody else. Design the change to become universal. That’s progress. That’s innovation.

This requires a fundamental shift in thinking. The role of the leader is systems design. You must transform your thoughts from the individual to their methods and techniques and develop your own methods for expanding and incorporating those insights into a larger system.

The Fosbury flop

Take a look at the chart above. It shows the winning height of the Men’s High Jump in the Olympics. It is an amazing artifact of the effect of systems on performance. In the early 20th century, there is an unstable system of performance. High fluctuations. Performance not sustained. By the end of the 20th century, performance is nearly half a meter higher, and the winning height less variable. What happened in between?

The what is actually a Who. Dick Fosbury. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics Dick Fosbury introduced a new technique for jumping over the high bar, called the Fosbury Flop. Using the Fosbury flop, the athlete jumps back first over the high bar and then kicks his legs up. The Fosbury Flop marked a decisive change in the high jump event. Before Dick Fosbury’s innovation, most elite jumpers relied on diverse techniques like the straddle or scissors. These imposed biomechanical limits on achievable heights. The Fosbury Flop fundamentally altered the interaction between athlete, bar, and landing surface. This was not simply a “better athlete” moment; it was a reconfiguration of the jumping technique which unlocked higher performance potential without fundamentally altering the athletes’ athleticism.

By adopting the Fosbury Flop, athletes could more effectively convert horizontal speed into vertical lift, and the introduction of deep foam landing pits made the technique viable and safe. The flop would’ve never occurred without a corresponding development of safety equipment. This interaction created a new frontier for performance. Rather than gradual gains from incremental improvements in strength or training, the system experienced a “step change” in output. Winning heights jumped from the low 2.20s in the mid-1960s to the mid-2.30s within 12 years.

Since the early 1980s, a new, stable system has emerged in which nearly all elite jumpers use the Fosbury Flop. The system has reached a mature equilibrium. The result is consistent world-class performances. While records can still be broken, the year-to-year variation in Olympic winning heights has narrowed since about 2000, reflecting both the stability of the technique and the refinement of training methods. This is a hallmark of a stable system: predictable output around a high-performance mean. All the result of studying the outlier performance of Dick Fosbury.

Low performers

Outliers don’t only occur on top of the organization. Just as often there are stragglers, low performers, people who can’t quite cut the mustard. How should you respond to such performers? The traditional response is again directed at the individual: motivate them, train them, make them work harder to improve. Instead, you should take the same approach. First, understanding whether or not they are simply unlucky but bound within the system or whether they are operating outside the lower bounds of the system. And if so, what can be done to bring them into the fold of the system.

This is how societies and organizations grow: by treating outliers as signals rather than superstars. High performers are not problems to be explained away or advantages to be hoarded. They are sources of insight into how systems can be improved to benefit everyone. No society or organization can stake their future on the appearance of superstars, they must strive to identify, adopt, integrate, normalize, systematize what make their existence possible.

The danger of individual attribution

The tendency to attribute superior performance to individual characteristics rather than systematic advantages is one of the most persistent and damaging biases in our current understanding of how the world works. It leads to strategies that are not only ineffective but actively counterproductive.

When leaders and organizations focus on the individuals rather than the systems, they invest heavily in trying to find, select more people like their high performers. Businesses develop elaborate personality “success” profiles, conduct extensive interviews, and pay premium salaries to attract “top talent.” But this is simply unsustainable, especially if these high performers are merely operating within the confines of the system. They strive harder with marginal results.

Worse, the focus on individual attribution can create a culture that undermines system improvement. If success is attributed to individual excellence, then failure must be attributed to individual inadequacy. This creates fear, reduces collaboration, and discourages the kind of systematic experimentation that leads to genuine improvement.

People become reluctant to share their innovations because they fear that making the system better for everyone will eliminate their individual competitive advantage. They hoard their discoveries rather than contributing to organizational learning. The very insights that could improve system performance for everyone become closely guarded secrets. Meanwhile, bad design continues to hold everyone else back.

Summary

The question of whether high performers are real is less important than understanding why they perform as they do. Systems thinking reframes individual achievement not as a mysterious personal trait, but as a signal about the conditions in which that performance emerged. True progress comes when we resist the temptation to idolize or vilify individuals and instead investigate the conditions of the system, the systemic enablers and constraints that shape results. When outliers are studied from this perspective they can extract principles, methods which influence and inform future design decisions. These decisions can make extraordinary performance accessible to the many rather than the rare.

Organizationally, sociologically, we cannot build a future on the unpredictable appearance of superstars and high performers. Systems must be designed so that ordinary people can consistently achieve what once seemed extraordinary. By treating high performance as a design challenge rather than a quest for individual achievement, we shift from chasing lightning to building the lightning rod. That is how innovation becomes embedded, resilience is strengthened, and excellence stops being an accident of circumstance and becomes the predictable output of a well-designed system.

Are high-performers real? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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