Congratulations on your promotion. Here’s your cap and badge. I just made you head of a military fighting force. Bad news: you are at war. Worse still, you are faced with a superior force.
Now, this is what the statistics show is likely to happen: If your army faces a superior force in the conventional way, you have no more than a 28.5 percent chance of winning.
However, if you refuse to follow the accepted rules of the game, your chances of winning, as verified by a study of wars spanning 200 years of human history, go above to a whopping 63.3 percent. That is 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 dynamics apply. You can topple the giants of the industry if you act unconventionally. Sometimes breaking the right rules can give you an industry on a plate.
Rules and regulations accumulate over time.
As we explore the art of breaking strategic rules, this idea is important: no system naturally tends toward simplicity. Left to evolve everything it becomes more complex, as each contributor 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, requires intelligent design.
It’s a big part of the reason so little disruptive innovation comes from an industry. Taxi drivers did not invent Uberand the bankers did not invent PayPalBecause people within these industries think through the lens of their own complex rules. It takes a rule-breaking maverick to see one thing again and venture that there could be a better way.
Fight against complexity
Take Steve Jobs’ obsession with a simple, clean and elegant design. In large part, it is what saved Apple upon return to the company. But it meant saying no to many things. Not 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Cleaning up clutter, resisting the creep of added complexity, and undoing outdated rules requires a champion of simplicity.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, mindless adherence to the rules is just annoying, sometimes even a bit of comedy (Google the Little britain parody ‘The computer says no’). But is that justification enough to embark on a campaign to overhaul your systems?
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 rule-based culture in your company, this list can be helpful as you begin to persuade others of your point of view. Why not present it at your next staff meeting? Ask the audience if they have seen real examples of each idea. Let your passionate discussion begin to drive change:
The cost of the rules
1. Speed
Rules involve processes that must be followed. Each process can take a small amount of time in isolation. But stacking rule upon rule and even a simple procedure can become an unreasonably time-consuming process. The slower things happen, the greater the total lethargy.
Sometimes useful things are not allowed to happen, because a firm rule prevents them from happening. Other times, a useful idea can’t get to market fast enough. It took Google two years to get all the 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 due to the burden of procedures, the willingness to perform them decreases. People perceive that going further is too much trouble. They are trained and conditioned to actively reduce their contribution.
With slower speed and more procedures, the word “no” is heard so often that it becomes a form of cultural conditioning. The ‘No’ removes initiative and the propensity to take risks. ‘No’ begins to become normative. It becomes the default setting for your organization.
3. Distrust
The greater the weight of the rules, the more it will take people to observe people to enforce those rules. In an ideal organization, where people are trustworthy and operate in a highly trustworthy 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 long enough, you could suffer a hemorrhage from top talent.
In a rule-based culture, highly compliant and low-initiative workers stay; frustrated innovators and high-initiative workers leave. Taken to its logical conclusion, everyone who remains blindly obeys the rules and bows to 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 objectives, your people will tend to choose safety and security at work over risk and bold action. The possibility of disorderly innovation attempts is closed, which excludes the possibility of smart cuts that can match exponential growth. Multiply this behavior and eventually no risks will be taken, severely diminishing the potential.
6. Silos galore
In a culture of strict rules, people tend not to focus on the big picture. They lose sight of the mission. They are terrified of contradicting the internal rules and regulations of their team or division, and they 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 honor 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 as an old steam train locomotive, racing with irresistible momentum on established rail lines. You can run your behemoth to optimized perfection, but if you are the Kodak of your industry, making movies, and cannot adapt your optimized perfection to the new digital reality, your optimized behemoth will work, flawlessly and unswervingly, with great and irresistible momentum, right on the edge of a cliff. Disruption kills dinosaurs that can’t adapt.
What rules does your organization cling to for no other reason than 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 acquire the influence necessary to overthrow the giants of the industry. They gift themselves with the space necessary to create truly disruptive innovation.