Organizations invest heavily in improving outcomes, teaching leaders to motivate, increase accountability, and drive performance. But William N. Martin suggests that this focus may be misplaced. "We strive for outcomes when we should be looking at conditions," Martin said. His experience as a utility lineman, flight nurse paramedic, ski patrol member, and mountain rescuer has shown him that the conditions surrounding a person often matter more than the demands placed upon them.
One emergency involving an 11-year-old girl with a traumatic amputation remains vivid for Martin. Inside the ambulance, capable emergency personnel worked with high intensity. Rather than telling anyone to calm down, Martin asked clinical questions—about blood pressure, prior interventions, tourniquet use, and vitals. The atmosphere shifted. "The people in that ambulance knew what they were doing," Martin said. "I didn't need to come in and tell them how to do their jobs. What I could do was change the condition we were operating in."
Outside, the girl's mother was overwhelmed. Martin handed her his phone and asked her to call herself, explaining he wanted her number to stay in contact during the flight. He gave her a role: get to the hospital safely because her daughter would need her. The circumstances hadn't changed, but the mother now had agency. For Martin, the patient's support system is part of the calculus of the patient's outcome.
This distinction extends beyond emergency medicine. Martin questions the tendency to assume poor performance means a lack of motivation, ability, or commitment. Before trying to change individuals, he believes leaders, educators, and parents should examine the conditions surrounding them. "What conditions have we allowed to persist?" Martin asks. "Are we giving somebody the ability to think and make decisions, or are the conditions around them teaching them to simply wait for someone else to tell them what to do?"
Environments are rarely the product of one person or decision. Some conditions are inherited, others develop gradually, and some are influenced by circumstances outside anyone's control. Becoming aware of those conditions, Martin argues, may be more useful than assigning blame.
He illustrates the idea with two seeds: a sunflower seed and a corn seed. They differ in appearance and genetic information, and given the right conditions, they become entirely different plants. Neither needs to be taught what it is capable of becoming. "You put the seed in the appropriate soil. It needs water. It needs sunlight. There are conditions that allow what's already in that seed to emerge," Martin said. "I didn't create the potential in the seed. It was already there." But throw the seeds randomly out a window, and their future depends on where they land. The potential inside them hasn't changed; the conditions have.
For Martin, this analogy applies to people. An organization can recruit talented employees yet create an environment where people fear making decisions. A leader can ask for initiative while rewarding conformity. Parents can want independent children while making every important decision for them. None of these outcomes necessarily begins with bad intentions, but demanding different outcomes without examining conditions misses part of the problem.
Martin is not interested in removing difficulty. Human beings are adaptive, and difficult circumstances can reveal extraordinary capability. But there is a difference between conditions that allow people to adapt and conditions that teach them to surrender their agency. This distinction matters increasingly as younger generations face problems their parents cannot anticipate. "I don't know what problems the next generation is going to have to solve because some of those problems haven't even been invented yet," Martin said. "So giving them all of my answers isn't the answer. They need to be able to think, adapt, connect with other people and make decisions."
That changes the responsibility of leadership. "Profit and performance are lagging indicators of the quality of our decisions," Martin said. If true, leaders may need to spend less time demanding better outcomes and more time understanding the conditions under which decisions are made. Sometimes the obstacle is the individual; other times, the conditions deserve a closer look. "We talk a lot about releasing human potential," Martin said. "I don't believe I can create somebody else's potential. What I can do is contribute to conditions that either allow it to emerge or help suppress it." That leaves leaders with a question worth asking before demanding the next outcome: What are we allowing to grow?
