Quadrants are useful to visualize the problem along a couple binary spectrums, but the process shouldn't stop there.
A more evolved process would avoid using such vague words to define problems that are complex, dynamic, interdependent, social, and psychological. Performance and expectations are wicked problems.
Determinations of performance and expectations are often closed and siloed as opposed to being open and transparent. That's a cultural problem arising from "difficult conversations". Organizations often make the mistake of over-simplifying these conversations.
I can think of few chasms between performance and expectations in twenty years that was reflective of reality. Organizations make sense of those situations slowly, poorly, and privately, if at all.
Why? Because if their cultures were reflective, protean, or sensemaking at all, they were closed conversations, ill-defined, informal, and not repeated on a regular basis.
A few examples I've sampled from my work:
- Numerous individuals suffered from self-medication while receiving little care or concern.
- Founders copy emotional traits of Jobs, Gates, Musk, and Torvalds not the intellectual ones.
- Trauma: ill-defined roles, changing expectations, and stack ranking.
Personally, I'll take competent but rough-around-the-edges because my experience has been that my most talented coworkers all fit that description no matter their education and experience while realizing that the edges are where the most important insights occur.