Same Capability, Different Conditions
- David Frank
- Jan 20
- 7 min read
For years, I interpreted inconsistent outcomes as evidence of my own limitations. The pattern was clear: some quarters I performed well, others I didn't, and the simplest explanation was that I lacked something fundamental. It took longer than it should have to recognize I was documenting mismatch, not capability. That reframe was one of the hardest admissions I've made, and one of the most clarifying. Once I could see it in myself, I started seeing it everywhere: in performance reviews, in hiring decisions, in the way we talk about people who don't deliver consistently. We resolve variability into character faster than we examine the conditions that shaped it. What follows isn't about excusing performance or defending it. It's about slowing down the moment where meaning gets assigned, because that moment quietly determines what happens next.
There is a particular discomfort that arises when performance varies. Not failure, not absence of ability, but inconsistency. We tend to resolve that discomfort quickly by attaching it to the person rather than the conditions. What makes this worth examining is that the same variability can signal very different things depending on how work is structured, how cognitive load accumulates, and what remains invisible in evaluation. When inconsistency is treated as a trait, it narrows opportunity. When it is treated as information, it changes what becomes possible.
In the first quarter, the work was exceptional. The thinking was clear, delivery reliable, and presence steady under pressure. Deadlines were met without drama, meetings felt purposeful, and decisions landed cleanly. By the third quarter, the language had shifted. Output varied. Deadlines slipped. Meetings felt scattered. The same person was now described as inconsistent, harder to predict, occasionally unfocused. Nothing obvious had changed about intelligence, motivation, or commitment. What had changed were the conditions under which that capability was being exercised.
What makes this moment difficult is not the variation itself, but the pressure to explain it. Variability creates uncertainty, and uncertainty demands resolution. The longer it remains unexplained, the more uncomfortable it becomes for everyone involved. Interpretation often rushes in to relieve that discomfort, not because it is accurate, but because it is available. Once a story begins forming, it rarely waits for complete information.
Most organizations notice variation quickly, because variation is hard to ignore. What tends to follow arrives faster than it needs to, as the discomfort of not knowing begins to outweigh the patience required to understand what changed and why.
When Variability Becomes Identity
"Inconsistent" is one of the most efficient labels organizations use. It sounds descriptive, even fair. It offers an explanation for why trust wavers and opportunities quietly narrow. Once applied, it allows a story to settle: this person is capable, but unreliable.
What the label rarely captures is whether the variability belongs to the person or to the environment asking for performance across shifting priorities, uneven support, and escalating cognitive load. Research on attribution bias shows how quickly we assign unstable outcomes to internal traits rather than situational factors, especially when we're under pressure to explain variance quickly and move on.¹ Once the label takes hold, it tends to travel faster than any analysis that might complicate it. Labels are portable. Context is not.
The evidence is real, but it is being asked to do more explanatory work than it can support on its own. That imbalance often goes unexamined even as decisions quietly begin forming around it.
Same Person, Different Conditions
Performance rarely varies in a vacuum. In the earlier quarter, scope was contained and expectations relatively clear. Interruptions were limited. Priorities were stable. The work rewarded depth rather than constant switching. Feedback arrived quickly enough to correct course before drift became visible, and cognitive load, while high, remained coherent.
Later, the work changed shape. Responsibilities expanded without subtraction. Meetings multiplied. Priorities shifted midstream. Decisions carried higher stakes but less clarity, and the cost of being wrong increased even as feedback became slower and more diffuse. The same person was now operating across fragmented contexts, holding more open loops, absorbing more ambiguity, and doing so with fewer visible markers of progress.
Research on cognitive load demonstrates that performance degradation often reflects overload rather than diminished capability, especially in environments that require sustained context switching and unresolved decision-making². Work on person–environment fit shows that even capable individuals underperform when their work context mismatches their cognitive strengths, and that the degree of environmental alignment predicts variance in output more reliably than individual traits alone¹⁰. More recent work shows that fluctuations in engagement over time also correlate with variability in performance, even among otherwise capable employees³.
To the individual, this experience often feels like working harder to produce less. Effort increases, but traction decreases. To the manager, it looks like inconsistency. Both perspectives are reasonable. Neither fully explains what is happening.
The Cost of a Fast Conclusion
When inconsistency is treated as a personal trait, several things begin to happen quietly. The individual starts to internalize the label, not because they believe they are incapable, but because they can no longer predict which version of their performance will be recognized. Attention shifts from the work itself to managing perception. Self-monitoring intensifies. Confidence erodes in ways that are difficult to articulate.
Research on self-regulation suggests that this kind of monitoring further taxes already strained cognitive resources, increasing the likelihood of additional variability⁴. The very effort meant to stabilize performance can end up destabilizing it further. Over time, the person begins to experience their own capability as unreliable, even when it is the environment that has become unstable.
Managers, meanwhile, begin to hedge. Work that once felt safe to assign now feels riskier. Development conversations grow less specific. Feedback emphasizes steadiness over sense-making. The goal subtly shifts from enabling good work to preventing undesirable outcomes.
None of this requires ill intent, which is why it unfolds so quietly. You can be a thoughtful manager and still watch this happen. A shared desire for predictability does the work on its own, narrowing choices without ever announcing that it has done so.
What Gets Missed
Cognitive load is not evenly distributed, even when roles appear similar on paper. The number of decisions required, the frequency of interruption, the ambiguity of success criteria, and the consequences of error all shape how capability shows up. When these variables shift, performance shifts with them⁵.
The danger is not mislabeling a single quarter. It is allowing that label to harden into identity. Once someone is known as inconsistent, the question subtly changes from 'what conditions help this person do their best work?' to 'how do we manage the risk they pose?' This shift happens so quietly that by the time anyone notices, the label has already made it into three performance reviews and a succession planning document.
Without language for the conditions, the gap has nowhere to go except inward. Over time, that inward turn begins to shape how both effort and capability are expressed, often in ways that reinforce the original concern.
The Organizational Mirror
Organizations exhibit a parallel pattern. Teams are praised for adaptability until adaptability produces uneven outcomes. Leaders speak positively about stretch until stretch reveals limits. Systems celebrate resilience until resilience wavers. Variability is tolerated rhetorically and constrained structurally⁹. It appears in the values deck but not in the promotion criteria.
Research on organizational reliability suggests that institutions often prioritize surface consistency over deeper signal detection, particularly under uncertainty⁶. More recent organizational research shows that workplace structures and behavioral norms significantly shape productivity and performance outcomes, reinforcing that variability often reflects system design rather than individual deficit⁷.
The result frequently appears functional on the surface, even as the range of acceptable performance quietly contracts.
When Interpretation Changes
The moment that matters most is not when performance varies, but when meaning is assigned to that variation. When inconsistency is treated as information rather than flaw, different questions become possible. What changed in scope. What accumulated quietly. What assumptions shifted. What support was removed or added.
These questions do not remove accountability, but they do complicate it. That complication is usually where the work slows down, which is why it is so often bypassed.
The Same Person Again
In the following quarter, some conditions changed. Scope was clarified. Decision rights were tightened. Interruptions were reduced. Feedback became more specific. The same person's performance stabilized, not because they became more capable, but because the environment stopped obscuring their capability.
To an outside observer, it looked like improvement. To those closer to the work, it looked like alignment. The earlier inconsistency did not vanish. It made sense.
Not every story resolves this way. Sometimes variability does signal a ceiling. Sometimes the role has outgrown the person. Sometimes the conditions cannot be changed. The point is not to deny those possibilities, but to avoid foreclosing them prematurely by mistaking complexity for deficiency.
The difference shows up long before anyone frames it as philosophy or principle, usually at the moment someone decides what this variability means and how much room it will be allowed to take up going forward. When that moment is slowed down, better hiring and better retention become possible, not through lowering standards, but through finally understanding what the standards were measuring in the first place.
For those who need some light reading:
¹ Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173-220.
² Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285.
³ Breevaart, K., Bakker, A., Hetland, J., Demerouti, E., Olsen, O. K., & Espevik, R. (2014). Daily transactional and transformational leadership and daily employee engagement. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 87(1), 138-157.
⁴ Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2007). Self-regulation, ego depletion, and motivation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1(1), 115-128.
⁵ Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
⁶ Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2007). Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
⁷ Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., & Ying, Z. J. (2015). Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), 165-218.
⁸ Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J., & Paas, F. (2019). Cognitive architecture and instructional design: 20 years later. Educational Psychology Review, 31(2), 261-292.
⁹ Meyer, R. D., Dalal, R. S., & Hermida, R. (2010). A review and synthesis of situational strength in the organizational sciences. Journal of Management, 36(1), 121-140.
¹⁰ Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of individuals' fit at work: A meta-analysis of person-job, person-organization, person-group, and person-supervisor fit. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281-342.
*Some sources are peer-reviewed journal articles that may require institutional or paid access. Abstracts are publicly available for all listed research.
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