Performance management is the institutional triptych of individual, team and organisation matching their demands and needs along one path. Here the contiguities of these three elements are blurred to attempt to bridge their gaps in skills, knowledge and information. It has moved from a command-and-control structure of top down implementation of goals to be met via annual reviews where pay-based bonuses are distributed and the weakest are let go (the Jack Welch model) to an increasingly decentralised system of constant feedback via informal meetings so as to meet the adaptive nature of modern business goals and focus on personal development within organisational culture, emplacing agility within the wider organisation through an individual-based and team-centric focus.

“Companies and shop-floors thus produce the heat of chatter, some of it meaningless and some of it subversive, creating code within code and internal signs that route-around management practices, filling in gaps and moving capacity by creating autonomous junctures via intra-shop-floor negotiations and informal guidelines”[1]. Organisations are a locus of activity, from membership negotiation to their structuration. They tessellate across informal and formal methodologies of practice, never fully controlling but never fully autonomising either. As they flit between adaptivity and rigidity, they must find methods of integrating the formal and informal, particularly when it comes to incorporating members and meshing individual aptitudes with organisational ideologies and needs.

“Every major organization will have to learn how to maintain its identity, the quality of its products and service, and its customer relationships, while being prepared to give up everything else”[1]. The continual transformation of markets, economies and organisations signals the increasing need for work patterns and communication strategies to be on the edge of adaptivity, responding intelligently to change and flux. The organisational changes of the past century show a move away from Taylorist production systems and work by standardised process toward more flexible methods of organisation that focus on functional units and teamwork. The centralised methods of GM and Ford and their in-house units, hierarchical structure and strict control over knowledge pathways[2] gave way the Kanban system of long-term subcontractor relations, decentralised teams and dialogic methods of understanding and reforming work patterns (as through Toyota’s Operations Management Consulting Division and their workshop-based quality circles[3]). In this change, “the need for collaboration in which all parties share a goal – so that they all profit from complementary innovations – but they are not so tightly integrated that as to lose the competitive spirit to innovate”[4] is paramount.