Rethinking High Performance in a World Wired for Overload

How leaders can design organizations for sustainable high performance

I’ve been thinking about performance lately.

Not the relentless deluge of productivity hacks. Nor the performative ‘hero-saves-the-day’ kind, busy solving self-precipitated crises¹ for eyeballs & accolades.

This essay grew out of conversations with clients and leaders who were exhausted by performance theater, and were searching for more meaningful and fulfilling ways to create lasting impact.

I pondered deeply on what it takes to nurture real, sustainable, transformative performance.

The kind that builds momentum without burnout. And self-sustains over a long period. The kind that grew a giant Sequoia out of a seed. And populated the thriving living ecosystems of the world. With patience. With persistence and care. By tending to the right conditions.

Botanic Gardens, Singapore 2023, Abhilasha Krishnan

And I kept returning to this counterintuitive insight:

“High performance happens in spite of high pressure, not because of it.”

Because the truth is that many of our current models of high performance were designed for a world that no longer exists. We live in a complex, highly interconnected, always-on world today.

Consider these disturbing but true facts: the average professional receives over 120 emails a day and attends around 62 meetings a month. A study in 2011 showed that we were bombarded by about 174 newspapers’ worth of data DAILY - it’s safe to say that has only gone up in the decade+ since.

Our brains and nervous systems, however, evolve slowly and incrementally over thousands of years. Their processing and response capacity is mismatched to this volume of stimulus. Our brains are geared to produce generative leaps in insight under the right nervous system conditions, not scale infinitely on data synthesis and analysis.

In this flood of urgency and input, performance is no longer about effort alone. Sooner or later, the law of diminishing returns catches up to us individually. Performance today is about how well our work systems support our nervous systems.

What concerns me is how much performance potential we are burning to cinders when we turn the flames up high, agitate the waters and wait to see whose nervous systems can survive being cooked.

And, I believe there is an alternate way to nurture and sustain high performance for leaders who care about the people in their teams as human beings. The question these leaders are asking is:

“How do we optimize systemic capacity for continued performance long-term instead of maximizing current performance now at the cost of the system’s capacity?”

The System Shapes the Performance

To answer the question above, we need to first understand what stress is and how it actually affects performance.

When the brain perceives threat, the amygdala triggers a survival response. Cortisol and adrenaline flood our system, bringing us into a state of alertness. But this also redirects energy away from the prefrontal cortex, where executive functions like planning, working memory, and decision-making live. Sustaining such a state of alertness over prolonged periods diminishes our capacity to respond thoughtfully, leading to poorer quality of decisions and impaired ability to innovate. Performance dips.

"Stress doesn’t reveal weakness—it reveals design flaws."

— Adapted from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “How Emotions Are Made”

We don’t all process stress the same way. For neuro-divergent minds, that’s one in five people, the threshold for overload could often be even lower than for neurotypical minds, affecting generative capacity and executive functioning faster. The very same biology that makes someone exceptional at connecting the dots between different ideas might also prevent them from filtering out sensory inputs to manage the system’s overload threshold.

When “Good” Isn’t Good Enough

We default to rewarding what’s visible and measurable.

Even when it’s not what matters most.

Even when it clashes with how living systems actually thrive.

"Nature doesn’t do ‘performance reviews’—it evolves through cycles of action and reflection."

— Giles Hutchins, Leading by Nature

We reward:

• Constant output → But creative work requires more downtime.

• Predictable pace → Yet most breakthrough ideas emerge unpredictably, not on schedule.

High performance isn’t always linear or predictable. Like nature, it pulses and throbs. Moves in cycles. Ebbs and flows. Rests and recuperates.

And so do we.

Meanwhile, systems designed to serve the middle keep letting down those at the edges. High-pressure environments, even if unintentional, can sabotage the very performance they’re designed to extract.

This biological difference is often viewed as a weakness at the individual level, and significant effort has been made over decades to fix, train and weed out those with perceived weaknesses from organizational structures. Leading to more of the same in organizations and over time, these systems lose their performance edge.

When viewed from a living systems lens, the story changes. Such diversity of thought is not a weakness in nature - it is life’s intelligent design for building in systemic diversity, which in turn increases the resilience of the system as a whole when we can learn to read the signals.

What’s Possible When We Listen to the System

I once worked with a leader whose mind moved like water - strategic, fluid, fast, possibilities-led.

He could spot patterns others missed, connect insights across markets, conjure up a market innovation opportunity where none existed. But put him in large leadership strategy meetings with its resultant performative pressure when standing up to present in a room of more than 50 peers, and the mandatory socializing at dinner afterwards? He would present competently and then withdraw into the background, doing his best to pass unnoticed.

Too many conflicting agendas to track. Too much stimulation. Unclear social expectations. Too little space for reflection or regulation.

Feeling overwhelmed with high sensory and social stimulation. AI generated.

Come talent review time, his line management was challenged when packaging his towering strengths in a way the organization deemed fit for placing someone in the next-level-leader talent pool. He was deemed as ‘lacking executive presence’.

"The quality of results produced in any system depends on the awareness from which people operate."

— Otto Scharmer, Theory U

I knew he was exceptional though, so I partnered with him to create the right conditions - quiet, one-on-one, low-pressure settings. I coached him to devise a 3-part visibility and executive presence strategy that worked for him - a ‘meeting-before-the-meeting’ approach, bringing regional stakeholders into the market to experience the impact he was creating and farming out high-socializing professional opportunities to deserving team members to take the pressure off him.

He orchestrated small, intimate and in-depth meetings with key stakeholders in the lead-up to the large annual gathering. He also invited regional stakeholders to visit the market at intervals, creating opportunities for multiple low-pressure conversations that allowed them to get to know him and his thinking over a period of time. He coached and readied some of his team to step up into high-visibility opportunities for their growth, letting his true strength as a highly effective mentor & manager shine through. This strategy needed more time to show results, but was far less draining on his capacities and far more in tune with his natural strengths.

Ideas flowed. Relationships developed. Strategy clicked.

The next talent cycle, his placement in the highest performance and potential box not only went unchallenged, but resulted in the creation of a distinct portfolio role that combined innovation and strategy for the region under him. He helped shape regional direction for years afterwards, his strategic brilliance finding expression in a role ideally suited to his strengths.

His perceived lack wasn’t a flaw—it was a design failure. The environment couldn’t channel his brilliance. Once we figured out how to shape the environment to his needs, he shone brighter than was possible for many others.

How often do we misread dips in performance as flaws in character, when they’re simply mismatches in conditions?

Performance as an Ecosystem

In nature, when a coral reef bleaches, we don’t blame the coral. We ask ‘What’s changed in the water?’

• Was the temperature too high?

• Did the current shift?

• Was something else out of balance?

Human performance follows the same rules.

When we push for individual outcomes without regard for the system, we’re not building high performance. Instead, we are forcing short-term output at long-term cost. Unfortunately, many leaders who operate in this way are often long gone before the collateral damage from their reign becomes obvious or attributable to them.

Living systems thrive when they’re diverse, adaptive, and interdependent. Monocultures collapse, in nature and in boardrooms. And workplaces that rely on a single “ideal” model of performance miss out on the true drivers of innovation.

Kali river estuary, Karwar, Dec 2024, Abhilasha Krishnan

“Diversity isn’t just a value—it’s a system advantage.”

The presence of neuro-divergent thinkers often signals what is working, and what isn’t. Like canaries in a coal mine² or axolotls in freshwater³, they’re not the problem. They are the indicator species signalling that there IS a problem.

So what sets regenerative leaders apart? They don’t extract more and more. Instead, they design for emergence.

They create conditions where brilliance becomes possible. And sustainable.

Again and again and again.

A Leadership Shift: From Control to Design

As a regenerative leader, if you want performance that endures, don’t just manage the person. First, tend to the system.

Here are 3 powerful actionable strategies to use to intentionally design workplace practices, policies and flow of work for systemic high-performance:

1. Design for Regulation: Build natural rhythms into the day, planning for transitions and recovery, as well as designating quiet zones or periods. Reduce over-alerting stimuli like sensory overload, surprise meetings or constant pings.

2. Recognize that Executive Function is Context-Dependent: Offer choice in how and when complex work is tackled. Don’t penalize those who perform best outside traditional models.

3. Create Systems of Safety, Not Pressure: Replace performative busyness with deep work culture and nurture psychological safety. Overhaul performance reviews to reward insight and impact, not just availability or performance.

In Part II of this series, I share in-depth examples and practices for each of these strategies, and how you can apply them in your organizations. In Part III of this series, I examine the inner development pathways to help you grow into a humane, regenerative leader who creates systems of sustained high-performance.

“Stress amplifies inequality. Regulation amplifies capacity.”

Designing for high performance does not mean lowering standards. What I am advocating for instead is that we redesign standards to align with human reality.

We need to stop viewing fluctuating capacity as a character flaw. It is neurobiology, plain and simple. What’s more, it is deeply human.

In a future where more and more repeatable, predictable work will be automated and standardized, the only true competitive advantage is to dial up our uniquely human capacities to care, connect, consider and create. That can only come from understanding our human nature more deeply, and designing systems that honour our humanity to help everyone flourish.

What one change will YOU make now to nurture the right conditions for sustained human high performance in your organization?

1. This fascinating TED talk shows how we are drawn to ‘exciting’ leadership styles, but they often trade boring but lasting results for performance antics.

2. For more in-depth understanding of the ‘Canary in a coal mine’ metaphor as it applies to Neurodiversity, reading Ludmila Praslova’s ‘The Canary Code’.

3. Aishwarya Khanduja’s substack on axolotls as indicator species, and the application of that concept in various systems is a fantastic read packed with insights and deep, probing questions.