We all want to maximize our potential. This is the story of how I discovered The Prosperity Trait.
How My Search for Consistent Human Performance Revealed the Hidden Cost of Variability
On September 26, the University of Delaware and the University of Virginia football teams met for the first time. Virginia won 42–3, but for me, the game’s significance extended well beyond the final score.
Over the past several months, I have written about two College Football Hall of Fame coaches who profoundly influenced how I came to understand leadership and human performance: Tubby Raymond at Delaware and George Welsh at Virginia. I played for Coach Raymond and later served twice on his staff. I also served on Coach Welsh’s staff at Virginia.
The game was Virginia’s annual UVA Strong Game, honoring Lavel Davis Jr., Devin Chandler, and D’Sean Perry, the three Virginia football players who lost their lives in the horrific shooting on the Grounds in November 2022. Their families were recognized at Scott Stadium, as was Mike Hollins, who was wounded in the shooting.
Tony Elliott was in his first season as Virginia’s head coach when the shooting occurred. The remainder of that season was canceled, leaving him with a responsibility no football coach could possibly have anticipated. He had to help grieving young men, coaches, families, and a university community find a way forward. The rebuilding that followed wasn’t simply about wins and losses. Coach Elliott has described it as “moving forward,” rather than moving on, with compassion becoming part of the foundation of the program.
The football results eventually followed. In 2025, Virginia won a school-record 11 games, finished atop the ACC regular-season standings, won the Gator Bowl, and finished No. 16 in the country.
On the opposite sideline was Ryan Carty, a former Delaware quarterback and member of the 2003 national championship team, now leading his alma mater through another significant transition. In 2025, Delaware’s first season at the FBS level, Coach Carty led the Blue Hens to the 68 Ventures Bowl, where they defeated Louisiana 20–13. Delaware became only the second program ever to win a bowl game in its first FBS season.
Watching Coach Elliott and Coach Carty on opposite sidelines brought the story full circle for me.
Coach Raymond and Coach Welsh had personalities, football philosophies, and approaches to leadership that could hardly have been more different. Yet both built systems that produced consistent performance over long periods of time. Eventually, those systems became cultures.
I believe both would be proud of what Coach Elliott and Coach Carty are doing today. They aren’t trying to recreate the programs Raymond and Welsh built. They are leading those programs through the challenges of their own time while preserving something more enduring: the understanding that a football program ultimately develops people.
My experiences in those programs also left me with a question I couldn’t answer:
Why was our most productive player never our most talented player? Never.
Talent mattered, but it didn’t reliably predict who would make the greatest contribution. Some extraordinarily talented players performed brilliantly one week and disappeared the next. Others possessed less obvious ability but seemed to get almost everything possible from what they had. The difference wasn’t simply potential. It was how consistently they converted that potential into performance.
Somehow, valuable human capability was being left unused.
I would spend much of my professional career trying to understand why.
Better Coaches = Better Systems
A good system does more than organize activity. It establishes expectations and standards. Once those standards are consistently applied, something important happens: variability becomes visible.
Without a system, you can always explain away inconsistent performance. Someone had a bad day. An opponent did something unexpected. Circumstances changed. It was all very subjective. But when preparation, teaching, expectations, accountability, and feedback align systematically, patterns emerge. Coaches can distinguish an isolated event from recurring variability.
Great coaches don’t eliminate variability because human performance fluctuates. They build systems that reduce unnecessary variability and make performance more consistent.
That, I believe, is one reason Tubby Raymond and George Welsh became Hall of Fame coaches. Their careers weren’t defined by one signature win or a single championship. They built systems that enabled people to perform at a high level repeatedly over long periods.
They made excellence more consistent.
I didn’t have the language of variability when I left coaching for graduate school. But I had seen the phenomenon. I wanted to understand why some people use more of their potential than others.
Kansas: Turning a Coaching Dilemma Into a Research Question
At The University of Kansas, that coaching dilemma became a research question.
One idea that shaped my thinking came from Dr. Bob Rotella, whom I studied under while coaching at Virginia. Psychologists had spent years studying learned helplessness—a process by which people develop beliefs that limit themselves even when they can influence the outcome.
Bob turned the question around: If helplessness of oneself could be learned, why couldn’t mastery of oneself be learned?
That question became the foundation for Learned Effectiveness: the idea that people can acquire belief systems that help them use their potential more effectively.
At Kansas, I began examining that idea systematically. Success alone wasn’t enough because it didn’t tell me whether someone was maximizing potential. I needed to stop comparing one person with another and start comparing people with their own potential.
The issue was human variability.
I wanted to know whether the difference between what someone was capable of producing and what that person consistently produced could be measured.
My research at Kansas showed that it could.
That work eventually led to the Prosperity Trait Index, or PTi. For the first time, I had a way to examine not simply how well someone performed, but how much of what they were capable of producing was consistently showing up in their performance.
I was measuring variability.
The research showed meaningful differences between people who consistently used their talent effectively and those whose performance varied more significantly from their potential. The PTi met scientific standards for validity, reliability, and fairness, and the research pointed toward a single underlying psychological trait.
I eventually called it The Prosperity Trait®.
But measurement raised the next question: If we could measure variability between potential and performance, could we also reduce it?
That question took me to the U.S. Air Force Academy.
A Leadership Laboratory
One reason I accepted the faculty appointment at the @U.S.Air Force Academy was that the athletic department understood its purpose unusually well.
Winning mattered. Teams competed for championships, postseason opportunities, and bowl games, but nobody confused those accomplishments with the ultimate product of the system. The athletic department’s responsibility was to help produce the best second lieutenant possible for the United States Air Force. Upon graduation, those second lieutenants would outrank approximately 84% of all Air Force personnel.
Athletics, therefore, wasn’t an end in itself. It was one part of a larger developmental system that included academics, military training, leadership development, and character—all preparing young people to lead others.
That was my objective as well.
At the Academy, I served as Head of Performance Psychology in the Human Performance Laboratory. Fisher DeBerry, another College Football Hall of Fame coach, frequently described the Academy as a leadership laboratory. From where I sat, I believed I was at its epicenter.
Cadet-athletes provided an extraordinary population for continuing my research because they operated within several demanding performance environments simultaneously. They had to perform athletically and academically while fulfilling military responsibilities and preparing to become officers. Kansas had shown me that variability between potential and performance could be measured. The Air Force Academy provided the environment for answering the next question:
Could that variability be systematically reduced?
My relationship with Fisher was different from my relationships with Tubby Raymond and George Welsh. I worked for Coach Raymond and Coach Welsh. I worked with Fisher. In many ways, Fisher was a client, and I was an internal consultant.
Fisher didn’t need a psychologist teaching him how to run a successful football program. My responsibility was to provide an educational infrastructure that strengthened human performance while fitting seamlessly into what he and his staff were already doing. My experience working for Coach Raymond and Coach Welsh had taught me an important principle:
The psychology had to fit the coaching system. The coaching system didn’t have to fit the psychology.
That principle extended throughout the Academy. Coaches didn’t need to become psychologists. They needed practical tools and strategies they could integrate into their existing systems to become better coaches, teachers, and leaders.
The challenge was no longer simply to identify variability. It was to determine whether my education programs could develop the underlying human capability and make performance more consistent.
What I first observed on a football field became a broader model of human performance.
Cadet-Athletes Leave Practice. Capability Goes With Them.
My research at the Air Force Academy showed that the Prosperity Trait could be developed. Improvements in PTi scores strongly correlated with performance improvements as my educational programs accelerated learning and helped cadets execute more consistently.
To understand why those results mattered, however, it helps to understand the environment in which cadets operated. Air Force Academy cadets typically carried 15 to 19 credit hours each semester and needed between 131 and 147 semester hours to graduate, depending on their academic program, spread across eight semesters. In practical terms, that often meant taking at least one more course each semester than students at most civilian universities. They did that while participating in military training, fulfilling leadership responsibilities, meeting physical requirements, and, for cadet-athletes, competing in Division I athletics.
Under those conditions, the cadets’ most valuable commodity was time. There was never enough of it. Academics competed with military responsibilities, military responsibilities competed with athletics, and all of them competed with the ordinary demands of young adulthood. Time created pressure. Anything that consumed it had to produce value.
That made their participation in my programs particularly meaningful. Programs were voluntary. I couldn’t give cadets more hours in the day, reduce their academic requirements, excuse them from military responsibilities, or shorten practice. I was asking them to invest some of their scarcest resource in learning how to perform more effectively within the demands they already faced. If the programs weren’t useful, they had every reason to spend that time somewhere else.
It could take up to three weeks for a cadet to book an appointment with me. I also held team workshops before preseason began and equipped coaches with tools and strategies to help them become better coaches, teachers, and leaders—not psychologists. I wasn’t reducing the demands on the environment. I was helping cadets develop the capability to perform more consistently within those demands.
What we began seeing mattered far beyond athletic performance. Cadets didn’t leave what they were learning in their sport. The effects showed up athletically, but also academically and in military performance.
I wasn’t developing just better athletes. We weren’t reducing variability in athletic performance. We were reducing variability in human performance. The capability being developed traveled with the cadet and could be applied wherever performance mattered.
That discovery also reinforced something I had learned from Tubby Raymond and George Welsh about the larger purpose of college athletics. Their coaching systems created cultures in which players learned to prepare, execute, make decisions under pressure, accept accountability, rely upon teammates, and become someone teammates could rely upon. At the Academy, I was seeing more clearly how capabilities developed in one demanding environment traveled with the cadet into another.
College athletics lasts four or five years. Its developmental consequences can last forty or fifty. Athletic competition provided immediate feedback. Life provided the longer test.
From Football to Business
When I began working with business leaders, I recognized the same phenomenon almost immediately.
Every business has variability in performance.
A salesperson can be exceptional one quarter and ordinary the next. A manager can lead effectively under one set of conditions and struggle when circumstances change. A team can execute successfully in one market and struggle somewhere else.
Organizations see these fluctuations every day. What surprised me was that most didn’t measure the variability itself.
They measured outcomes—revenue, margins, productivity, quality, turnover, market share, and dozens of other results. Those measures tell leaders what happened. Explaining why it happened is often far more subjective, influenced by assumptions and biases. More importantly, outcome measures don’t tell leaders how consistently their people are performing relative to what they’re capable of producing.
That distinction is fundamental because if you don’t measure variability, you can’t manage it.
Every organization has some degree of variability between potential and actual performance. The larger and more persistent that variability becomes, the more human capability goes unused.
That variability has a cost.
Organizations have already invested in recruiting, developing, compensating, equipping, and supporting their people. When those people consistently perform below what they’re capable of producing, some of the value of that investment remains unrealized.
That is the hidden cost of variability.
Reducing variability makes performance more consistent. Greater consistency converts more of the organization’s existing potential into actual performance. Variability isn’t merely a performance problem. It has a cost. Reducing it releases value that the organization already possesses but isn’t consistently realizing.
That is untapped value.
The management opportunity is to measure variability, understand what produces it, and systematically reduce it.
This is where systems thinking becomes especially important. A productivity problem may not simply be an effort problem. Poor execution may not simply be a strategy problem. Resistance to change may not simply be an attitude problem. Problems with teams may originate somewhere other than interpersonal relationships. What appears to be the problem may actually be a symptom of something happening elsewhere in the human system.
If leaders measure only outcomes, they risk treating symptoms. Measuring the variability between potential and performance gives them a better opportunity to understand what produces those outcomes—and to manage it.
What Does Maximizing Potential Actually Produce?
Over time, the research and applications of The Prosperity Trait raised another question: What does maximizing potential actually produce?
Maximizing potential isn’t an outcome by itself. It produces outcomes.
Across the research and subsequent applications, eight became particularly important: Change Readiness, Talent Optimization, Productivity, Strategy Execution, Teams, Innovation, Leadership Effectiveness, and Culture.
These aren’t unrelated organizational objectives. They are interconnected points within the human system where variability becomes visible, and greater consistency creates value.
The Prosperity Trait® is the underlying human capability that influences how consistently people convert potential into performance. Developing that capability reduces the variability between what people are capable of producing and what they actually produce.
The scoreboard changes, but the underlying question doesn’t:
How much of our potential are we consistently converting into performance?
The variability between the two represents both a hidden cost and an untapped source of value.