The Seven Performance PillarsSee the connected conditions shaping performance.

HICD Forward begins with the performance result that must improve and the value that improvement should create. This pillar clarifies the current result, the required result, who is affected, what value is at stake, and how meaningful improvement will be recognized.

It prevents institutions from beginning with a preferred activity, tool, or solution before the performance gap is understood.

This pillar helps reveal

1. The difference between current and required performance.
2. The stakeholders who experience, depend on, or value the result.
3. The evidence that will demonstrate meaningful improvement.

Institutions are shaped by both formal and informal conditions around people. This pillar examines roles, expectations, motivation, accountability, trust, supervision, information, informal norms, and the incentives that encourage or discourage the required behavior.

It helps leaders avoid assuming that weak performance means weak people. Staff may understand what is expected but still lack authority, support, confidence, information, or a credible reason to act differently.

This pillar helps reveal

1. Whether roles, expectations, and accountability are clear.
2. What the institution formally requests and what it actually rewards or tolerates.
3. Whether people have the trust, information, authority, and support needed to act.

Performance is produced through real work. This pillar examines workflows, handoffs, bottlenecks, approvals, decision points, rework, system touchpoints, and the operating model through which the institution produces value.

Formal procedures may describe the intended process, while daily work follows a different route. The pillar reveals where reform, technology, or a new practice must enter the actual workflow to change performance.

This pillar helps reveal

1. How work moves across roles, functions, systems, and organizational boundaries.
2. Where approvals, delays, rework, bottlenecks, and workarounds occur.
3. Whether the operating model supports the result the institution is expected to produce.

Institutions do not operate only through formal structures and procedures. They also operate through mandates, authority, interests, relationships, constraints, incentives, resources, risk, and power.

This pillar examines whether an improvement effort is aligned with the institutional and political environment in which it must survive. It is particularly important when several organizations, functions, partners, or levels of authority must act together.

This pillar helps reveal

1. Who owns decisions, resources, implementation, and risk.
2. Which stakeholders can support, delay, redirect, or block progress.
3. Whether competing interests, mandates, and incentives make the proposed change feasible.

Capability is not the same as training. It is the ability to perform specific work under real operating conditions.

This pillar examines what leaders, managers, teams, and staff must be able to do differently, and whether they have the knowledge, skill, judgment, tools, practice, support, authority, routines, and confidence required to perform consistently.

This pillar helps reveal

1. The specific tasks, decisions, and judgments required.
2. Whether people have enough practice, feedback, tools, and job support.
3. Whether the work environment enables people to apply their capability consistently.

Leadership determines whether change is reinforced or left as a plan, message, or launch event. This pillar examines leadership behavior, review routines, conversations, decisions, resource choices, accountability practices, and the learning disciplines that sustain improvement.

It focuses on what leaders repeatedly ask, review, reinforce, tolerate, escalate, fund, and protect.

This pillar helps reveal

1. Whether leaders reinforce the new direction through decisions and daily behavior.
2. Whether review routines focus on performance, barriers, adoption, and operating reality.
3. Whether leaders create enough trust and space for honest learning during implementation.

Sustained improvement requires meaningful signals, trusted evidence, useful feedback, regular performance review, and mechanisms for adjusting action when implementation reveals new constraints.

This pillar distinguishes reporting from learning. Data creates value only when it helps the institution understand what is happening, make a decision, and improve the next cycle of work.

This pillar helps reveal

1. Whether the institution has meaningful performance, adoption, and stakeholder value signals.
2. Whether evidence is visible, trusted, discussed, and connected to decisions.
3. Whether the institution can adjust interventions, resources, workflows, or expectations when conditions change.