These are your rules, break them!
Congratulations on your promotion. Here’s your cap and badge. I just appointed you head of a military fighting force. Bad news: it turns out that you are at war. Worse yet, you are up against a superior force.
Now here’s what’s likely to happen based on statistics: If your army faces a superior force in the conventional manner, you have no more than a 28.5 percent chance of winning.
However, if you refuse to play by the accepted rules of the game, your chances of winning, as verified by a study of wars spanning 200 years of human history, are gone. up to a whopping 63.3 percent. That’s a change from ‘will probably lose’ to ‘will probably win’.
Do I have your attention?
Sometimes breaking the rules is incredibly effective. In the business world, the same dynamic applies. You can topple the giants of the industry if you act unconventionally. Sometimes breaking the right rules can bring you an industry on a plate.
Rules and regulations accumulate over time.
As we explore the art of strategic rule-breaking, this insight is important: no system naturally tends toward simplicity. left to evolve, everything it becomes more complex as each taxpayer builds new layers of rules and regulations on top of the old ones. Increasing complexity is actually the path of least resistance. Simplicity, far from being a natural state, demands intelligent design.
It’s a big part of the reason so little disruptive innovation comes from one industry. Taxi drivers did not invent Uberand the bankers did not invent PayPal, because people within these industries think through the lens of their own complex standards. It takes a rule-breaking maverick to see something again and venture to think there might be a better way.
fight complexity
Take Steve Jobs’ obsession with simple, clean, and elegant design as an example. In large part, it is what he saved Apple upon his return to the company. But it meant saying no to a lot of things. No to a wide range of products: keep it simple. No to extra buttons: keep it simple. No to excessive complexity: the system must be easy and intuitive to operate.
Cleaning up the clutter, resisting the creep of added complexity, and dissolving outdated rules requires a champion of simplicity. It requires leadership willing to challenge existing systems.
How much do bad rules really cost you?
At the most simplistic level, thoughtless adherence to rules is simply annoying, sometimes even comical (Google the little britain play ‘The computer says no’). But is that justification enough to start a system review campaign?
Turns out we can do a lot better than that. There are many compelling reasons to reduce and relax the rules in your organization. Here are 6 of them.
As part of your own efforts to change the rules-based culture at your company, this list may be helpful as you begin to persuade others of your point of view. Why not present it at your next staff meeting? Ask attendees if they have seen real examples of each idea. Let your passionate discussion start driving change:
The cost of the rules
1. speed
Rules imply processes that must be followed. Each process can take a small amount of time in isolation. But piling rule upon rule and even a simple procedure can become an unreasonably slow process. The slower things happen, the greater the total lethargy.
Sometimes useful things are not allowed to happen because a rule absolutely prevents them from being done. Other times, a useful idea can’t get to market fast enough. It took Google two years to get all the background research they needed from Legal and Marketing to launch Google+. By then, Facebook had such a critical mass that Google’s excellent compliance didn’t matter.
2. Will
When simple acts are slow to perform due to the burden of procedures, the will to do them declines. People perceive that going further is too much trouble. They are trained and conditioned to actively reduce their contribution.
With speeds slowing down and procedures increasing, the word ‘no’ is heard so often that it becomes a form of cultural conditioning. The ‘No’ eliminates the initiative and the propensity to take risks. The ‘no’ begins to be normative. It becomes the default setting for your organization.
3. Mistrust
The greater the weight of the rules, the more you need people to watch people to enforce those rules. In an ideal organization, where people are trusted and operate in a high-trust environment, you only need one person to keep an eye on each person: themselves. The hierarchy becomes zero sum and does not need to be accumulated.
4. Loss of talent
Feelings of empowerment and a sense of purpose are among the top needs of employees. Feelings of disempowerment are strong incentives to leave. If you maintain a sense of helplessness and frustration for long enough, you could hemorrhage top talent.
In a rule-based culture, highly compliant workers with little initiative stay; frustrated innovators and high-initiative workers leave. Taken to its logical conclusion, everyone who remains blindly obeys the rules and knows the authority, because no one has the ‘radical courage’ not to. You create the conditions for extreme groupthink.
5. Safety trumps risk taking
In cases where the rules directly contradict the goals, your people will tend to choose safety and job security over risk and bold action. The possibility of haphazard attempts at innovation is closed, which excludes the possibility of clever cuts that can match exponential growth. Multiply this behavior and eventually no risk is taken, severely diminishing the potential.
6. Silos galore
In a culture of high standards, people tend not to focus on the big picture. They lose sight of the mission. They are terrified of contradicting the internal norms and rules of their team or division, and will tend to prioritize behavior that creates safety for them within that smaller division (silo), over behavior that helps the company as a whole. They may not even know how their contribution helps the organization, which can create immense conflict between divisions. Unfortunately, your competition will not respect your internal divisions. They can see an opportunity in such weakness.
The result of these accumulated costs will be that growth will only occur incrementally in your organization, if at all.
They also introduce all the inherent dangers of a giant that cannot adapt to change.
Think of it like an old steam locomotive, racing with irresistible momentum on established railway lines. You can run your giant at optimized perfection, but if you are the Kodak of your industry, making movies, and you can’t adapt your optimized perfection to the new digital reality, your optimized giant will run, perfectly and without hesitation, with great and irresistible momentum. right on the edge of a precipice. The disruption kills the dinosaurs that cannot adapt.
What rules does your organization cling to, for no reason other than the fact that the rules have always existed? What if you appointed yourself to champion the drive for greater simplicity and agility? After all, they are your rules. You can break them. And those who do it strategically gain the clout to topple the industry giants. They give themselves the space to create truly disruptive innovation.
