Taming tigers

/ 01 June 2009

Rip up the rulebook
We all have a rulebook that tells us not to question convention, and forces us to play it safe. But by challenging these rules, we could achieve goals and profits we never thought possible, says Jim Lawless

Leaders and managers across a wide variety of industries share many of the same concerns. One of them, and it’s a major one, is the ability to cultivate innovation in creating, making and selling products. The continual development of talent (including our own) is another. The key to enjoying success in both lies in rewriting the rulebook.

‘Why is it this way?’ and ‘Why can’t we do it another way?’ are questions that challenge the rulebook, and they can produce innovation and develop talent.

Some people never ask these questions. They accept the rules in the rulebook. If we lead people, our responsibility is to provide an environment, a reason and perhaps even individual guidance that can help us to explore such questions. If we are not asking the questions ourselves, as leaders, our only responsibility is to resign.

So what is this rulebook? What are these rules? The rulebook is terrifying because its rules appear to be real, intellectually justifiable and unchangeable. Everybody over the age of 40 remembers thinking that low-cost air travel couldn’t work. Freddie Laker’s Skytrain proved that. Didn’t it?

Crushing creativity

The rules are powerful fictions. They seduce us and provide us (and our employees) with justification to stay within the safety zone, to keep free from risk and to allocate blame elsewhere. They destroy innovation and personal development.

We all have a rulebook in our heads. It’s how we see the world. In other books, articles and management guides you might see what I call ‘rules’ referred to as ‘beliefs’, but I don’t think that word is powerful enough. I don’t think that ‘beliefs’ begins to give us the full extent of what we’re up against here. It’s a rule because it often appears to be written in stone. It’s a rule because often it has come to us from society, from our peers, from the culture of our workplaces. It’s a rule because if we break it, there may well be genuine, and very real, consequences for us.

Except, of course, the rules aren’t real at all. It’s just lots of people subscribing to the same fiction. Rather than hard and fast facts and mandates, rules are simply shared inventions we’re too scared to challenge. But someone, somewhere, is prepared to question the fiction, which could give them the advantage over you.

Unwritten rules

Let me get this straight. I’m not talking about the law of our land, the rules of religions, or our morals and conscience. I’m not talking about the ways in which we have learnt to behave in order to do the right thing by our families and others around us. I’m not talking about rules that can be proven (such as gravity ­– if I walk off the edge of a cliff, I will almost certainly face injury). I’m talking about the kind of rule that says ‘I can’t swim’ or ‘I’m great at maths but can’t write essays’ or ‘We can’t invest in this innovation, it might not work’.

We use these rules to make sense of the world. We use these rules to navigate problems and challenges at home and at work. We create these rules to make ourselves safe.

We abide by these rules because we desperately want to be able to predict the outcome, to get it right, just like we were taught we should in the classroom. But innovation has no rulebook, no right answers, just the best answer we can create. And in order to find the best answer, we will have to take risks, we will need to break some of the rules that we have all used to create and sustain the current situation, and that process cannot provide a predictable outcome. The only outcome that we can predict with any certainty is the one at the end of the path without risk attached. If we use our rulebook to justify that risk-free answer and steer away from the course where the outcome is less sure, we threaten the evolution of the organisation.

So we are surrounded by conventional wisdom. And we follow it. But how did all that conventional wisdom get there? Conventional people put it there. So what is the conventional wisdom in your organisation? What’s stopping you from challenging it? And what is the consequence going to be in two, four, ten years’ time if you don’t challenge it?

What halts us is often the fear of failure. The rulebook protects us from this fear. ‘There’s no point in trying that – we know it can’t be done. Someone has already proved it.’ Oh really?

Fear as fuel

At this stage, or so conventional wisdom dictates, I’m supposed to tell you not to fear failure as you step into unmapped territory; that failure is acceptable. What cosy, unhelpful insanity. I am supposed to tell you about how many filaments Edison burnt before he managed to get one that lit a bulb and how this never bothered him. I never met Mr Edison, but I bet it bothered him deeply. I bet he feared failure. I bet Mrs Edison feared it quite a lot, too.

I bet it made him work very hard to write the new rulebook, the one where the world had electric lights. He may have accepted that mistakes would be made along the way. But if he had accepted failure as an option, you’d be reading this by candlelight.

So, contrary to conventional wisdom, let’s fear failure. Let’s fear the idea of not succeeding in something we’ve worked really hard at, without letting that fear paralyse. Instead, let that fear of failure spur us on and let’s take not failing really seriously. Let’s use that idea to start us questioning the rulebook.

Pain is temporary, as they say, but failure lasts forever. And with that thought in mind, what is the rule that you need to break today?