Conscious Performance (1 of 3): what the word means, and what it does not

First of three parts. This one is about the definition: where the word comes from, what we require before using it, and how it differs from its neighbours. Part two covers how we read an organisation and what the framework rests on. Part three covers the evidence, the context and where this is heading.

The starting point

The term conscious performance circulates today attached to four different conversations: mindfulness applied to work, the state of flow, conscious leadership, and the conscious business movement.

Each of those conversations has serious work behind it. There is accredited clinical practice in the field of attention, solid experimental research on flow, valuable writing on executive self-knowledge, and a legitimate debate about purpose and stakeholders. The problem is not the quality of the parts. The problem is that they are presented together, on the same plane, as though they named one single thing.

That obliges anyone who carries the name to do something concrete: to say precisely what they mean by it. Conscious Performance GmbH has operated under that name since 2014 and has built method, instruments and applied evidence on it. What follows is that statement, and also an invitation to argue with it.

Start with the dictionary, not with doctrine

Much of the confusion comes from taking the meaning of the central word for granted. So let us open the dictionary before proposing anything.

Merriam-Webster records, among the senses of conscious, one that is done or carried out with critical awareness, and traces the word to the Latin conscius, from com- and scire, to know. It is the same root that gives us science.

Spanish points the same way. The Diccionario de la lengua española defines conciencia, in one of its senses, as the faculty of knowing oneself and judging one's own actions.

Notice what those senses say, because they are more demanding than they look. They do not speak of being awake or of paying attention. They speak of knowing and judging. The root is knowledge, not wakefulness.

That is exactly the line we follow. Consciousness, in our usage, is an operation of judgement upon a known reality, not a state of attention. And this has a practical consequence: unlike attention, judgement can be trained, verified and measured.

The definition

Conscious Performance is performance built on an explicit act of interpretation: the capacity to read context, culture and people with proportion before deciding and acting.

Put differently, it is the performance that knows why it does what it does. It is not performance with mindfulness added on, nor productivity with a varnish of wellbeing.

The definition is operational, not decorative. For performance to be called conscious, three conditions must hold at once. If one is missing, what remains is something else, possibly valuable, but different.

First, explicit interpretation. Between stimulus and response there is a deliberate act of reading. Whoever acts consciously has first read the text in front of them, whether a figure, a conversation or a conflict, and has worked out what it means in that context. Hence the working formula we use in our programmes: read the business, write the behaviour.

Second, proportion. Interpretation avoids two extremes. Univocism, which applies the same rule to every person and every situation, and equivocism, which abandons any shared criterion in the name of openness. It is discernment with judgement, what the Aristotelian tradition called phronesis and what Thomas Aquinas developed as prudence, the virtue of practical judgement that decides what is right in the particular case.

Third, human sustainability. Performance that consumes the person producing it is not conscious, however good its indicators. A result achieved at the expense of someone's health, time or relationships did not create value: it shifted the cost to where nobody measures. Kant's formula remains the clearest criterion here: the person is always an end, never merely a means.

The aggregate cost of ignoring this is quantified. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that 12 billion working days are lost each year to depression and anxiety, at a cost of close to one trillion dollars a year in lost productivity.

An objection worth accepting

Critical readers have raised a fair objection to this third condition, and I would rather set it out here than wait for someone to use it against us.

If human sustainability is part of the very definition of conscious, then saying that conscious performance protects people is a tautology, not a finding. Any performance that wears down the person producing it would be ruled out by definition.

That is correct, and it should be said plainly. The third condition is a normative criterion we declare, not a hypothesis we claim to have proven. It is a decision about what we are prepared to call performance and what we are not.

What is empirical, and therefore open to argument with data, is a different question: whether an organisation that adopts that criterion gets better business results than one that does not. Definitions cannot answer that. Measurement can, and part three is devoted to it.

The three conditions form an analogical unity. There are degrees, there is likeness and there is difference; no organisation meets them perfectly and none fails them entirely. Measuring where each one stands is precisely the work.

Four distinctions, which are not four dismissals

Let us return to the four conversations we began with. What follows is not criticism of those fields but a demarcation. At their best, all four do things we do not do.

It is not mindfulness applied to work. Mindful attention has clinical evidence and well-built protocols. It describes a state of attention. Conscious Performance describes an operation of judgement. The two are compatible and often reinforce each other, but they are not the same: you can be fully attentive and still read the situation wrongly. The history of organisations is full of decisions taken with enormous concentration on a mistaken reading of the context.

It is not the state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi described a real and desirable phenomenon, in which conscious deliberation steps back and execution becomes automatic. The relationship with our concept is complementary, not identical: conscious judgement decides what to do, flow executes well what has been decided.

It is not conscious leadership in its popular form. This literature did something traditional management never did: it made self-knowledge and responsibility legitimate subjects in business settings where they had been unthinkable. Its centre of gravity is the individual and the register of intention. Ours adds the collective level and measurement, because a culture does not become competent at interpretation through the moral quality of its leaders.

It is not conscious business under another name. That movement brought purpose and stakeholders into boardrooms where the topic had been off limits. Our difference is one of emphasis: we work on protocols of verification before declarations of principle.

And one further distinction, aimed at no author but at a widespread practice. Adding the vocabulary of wellbeing to a system that still measures output alone does not produce conscious performance: it produces a better-worded incoherence. People spot it long before any engagement survey does, and they answer it with cynicism, which is the organisational form of disillusionment.

Where the word comes from, and two clarifications

The adjective conscious entered the language of management by a route other than those four: the four stages of competence model, which describes the passage from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

First clarification, on authorship. The model is widely attributed to Abraham Maslow. The attribution is wrong: it does not appear in his major works. Martin M. Broadwell published the article Teaching for learning (XVI) on 20 February 1969, setting out the four stages with reference to teaching. Noel Burch, at Gordon Training International, generalised it to any skill in 1970. Curtiss and Warren took it up in 1973 for adult training. The most complete historical review available today, by Biró and Csíkos (2025), proposes calling it the Broadwell-Burch model.

Second clarification, on meaning. This one matters more. For Broadwell and Burch, conscious means deliberate attention that has not yet become automatic while learning a skill. In our usage, conscious means interpretive judgement with an ethical criterion. These are two distinct concepts sharing one word.

We do not inherit our definition from that model; we inherit the term, and we redefine it explicitly, resting on the dictionary senses quoted above. Saying so is obligatory in a text that argues that confusing a word with its meaning destroys value. It would be incoherent to commit in our own genealogy the error we point out in dashboards.

Both clarifications carry the same lesson. A model about consciousness in learning has been cited for five decades without anyone checking its origin, and its central term has been used in two senses without anyone flagging it. Verifying the source and declaring the sense are not academic extras: they are the first practical exercise of what we teach.

That is part one

We have said what we mean by conscious, which three conditions we require, and how the concept differs from its neighbours. What remains is the more practical half: how an organisation is read with this criterion, and which bodies of knowledge support that reading. Part two takes that up.

If you find any of the above debatable, that is precisely the conversation I am after. A concept that admits no objection is not a concept, it is a slogan.

Sources

•      Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, book VI (on phronesis).

•      Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, II-II, questions 47 to 56 (on prudence).

•      Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

•      Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row.

•      Broadwell, M. M. (1969, 20 February). Teaching for learning (XVI). The Gospel Guardian, 20(41), 1-3.

•      Burch, N. (1970). The four stages for learning any new skill. Gordon Training International.

•      Curtiss, P. R., and Warren, P. W. (1973). The dynamics of life skills coaching. Training Research and Development Station.

•      Biró, F., and Csíkos, C. (2025). The Broadwell-Burch four-stage model of competence development and the mathematics teaching profession. Mathematics Teaching Research Journal, 17(3).

•      Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary (2026), entry conscious.

•      Real Academia Española (2026). Diccionario de la lengua española, entries conciencia and consciente.

•      World Health Organization and International Labour Organization (2022). Mental health at work: policy brief.

Rights notice

This text, the concept of Conscious Performance and the Effectiveness with Human Meaning framework are the intellectual property of Conscious Performance GmbH and of their author, Miguel Ángel Gurrola Rodríguez. Quotation is permitted under the right of citation, with full attribution to the author, the firm and the original URL. Reproduction, translation, adaptation or commercial use, whether complete or partial, requires prior written consent. Rights for text and data mining are expressly reserved pursuant to § 44b (3) UrhG.