I didn't set out to write a model. I set out to answer a question that kept following me around a career: why do some people consistently make clear, confident, well-timed decisions — in their work and in their personal lives — while others, just as capable, stay stuck?
That question first sharpened during my years as an executive in the human resources department of a major utility in Phoenix, Arizona. I led a team across executive and employee development, apprenticeship training, employee relations, health services, compliance, and performance management — with oversight touching roughly 6,000 employees.
Over time, a pattern was impossible to ignore. A certain kind of person kept showing up across every department and every level: clear, resilient, consistently good at making decisions. Not because they had more resources or more authority — but because something in how they thought was different from everyone around them.
Twenty years of the same question, from a different chair
After leaving the utility to start my own consulting firm, Integrated Performance Systems, I got to keep chasing that question — this time across a much wider range of clients and industries. The pattern held. The most effective people weren't relying on random tactics or sheer willpower. They were following something closer to a repeatable sequence: a series of internal steps and conditions that consistently led to positive, productive, growth-oriented action.
Naming that sequence took longer than I expected — and it wasn't something I finished alone.
The missing piece
For years, I taught graduate courses in Organizational Leadership at the University of Phoenix, and I used my students as a proving ground for the model as it developed. At one point, I asked a class directly: what am I missing from this formula?
Their answer reshaped the whole framework. To move from simple awareness to actively seeking new information, they told me, something else had to happen first — a catalyst. That catalyst was collaboration: inviting other people in to offer their insight, their perspective, their honest read on what you can't see about yourself. Once that piece was in place, the model held together the way it hadn't before.
Why put it in a book
I've spent over 30 years in rooms — boardrooms, classrooms, one-on-ones — watching capable people talk themselves out of the life they actually wanted, usually for reasons that had nothing to do with talent or effort. What was almost always missing wasn't ability. It was a clear, repeatable path from where they were to where they wanted to be.
The Human Effectiveness Code is that path, written down. Seven components — awareness, collaboration, additional information, readiness, choice, more informed decisions, and better actions — that build on each other in sequence, the same way I watched them build on each other in hundreds of people over three decades.
It's not a formula you follow once. It's a code you learn to live by.