Time to put some sacred cows out to pasture

Written by Admin on Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Time to put some sacred cows out to pasture

DETLEF REIS

Two weeks ago, we started to discuss the first three of five exploration tools you can use to check the reality of something: standard reality checks, belief checks and assumption tests. Today, let’s complete our discussion on reality checks by looking at two other techniques that I call “Break rules for fools” and “The sacred cow slaughterhouse”.

4. Break rules for fools: Most rules are initially made for reasons that make a lot of sense - just imagine a football match (or any other game) without any rules. No wonder that we follow these rules. But time passes, and things change. And, as we have discussed before in this column, over the past two decades our personal lives as well as the business world have changed enormously. Now, because we live in times of exponential change, it is likely the original reason for a number of rules may no longer exist. However, because the rules are still in place, most people uncritically continue to follow these non-sense rules. (Here, realise that under the heading “rules for fools”, we are not only talking only about rules in the word’s truest sense, but also about related concepts like laws, regulations, policies and guidelines.)

My tips: If you are an individual, and you come across a “rule for fools”, be courageous and challenge it by choosing one of the following four strategies: (a) Deliberately break the rules - and deal with the consequences; (b) Find or create an opposite rule that stands diametrically opposite to the original one; (c) Create a special case where the bothersome rule doesn’t apply; (d) See if you circumvent the rule by eliminating the key circumstances that trigger it. Be creative and flexible in finding the best way to get beyond the rule.

If you are a business leader, consider creating the following new rule in your organisation: “Every rule here can be challenged except this one”. Then encourage and reward your employees to flag-up all rules for fools. Lead your firm in the spirit of Thomas Edison: “Surprises and reverses can serve as an incentive for great accomplishment. There are no rules here, we’re just trying to accomplish something”.

Another thing you can do as a business leader is to bring in a creativity consultant to act as fool. Traditionally, a fool could be found at the court of every king, emperor or pharaoh. Under the protection of the fool’s cap, he could parody proposals and challenge assumptions and the prevailing mindset at court, waking the ruler out of conventional thought patterns and protecting him or her from dangerous groupthink. Every smart ruler in history held his court fool in high esteem, so consider bringing in a creativity consultant as a “modern-day fool” to check out the thinking at your “corporate court”. Or give yourself a licence to “be foolish” and ask “foolish” questions that cut through to the core of a situation.

5. The sacred cows slaughterhouse: Do you recognise the following configuration of letters? Q W E R T Y U I O P. Take a moment to think about this question, as we will come back to it later.

What is a sacred cow? According to Wiktionary, it is something that cannot be tampered with, or criticised, out of fear of public outcry. Some old ideas or concepts have been so successful that they have become immune to criticism and have become “sacred cows”. The Ptolemaic model of the world as a flat disc in the centre of the universe was a sacred cow for many centuries, and so were Isaac Newton’s mechanical laws for the world of physics.

Now slaughtering a sacred cow means falling out of love with a once cherished but outdated idea to give yourself the freedom to look for new, better ideas. Galileo Galilei and Nikolaus Copernicus slaughtered the Ptolemaic model with their realisation that the earth moves around the sun, and Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity did the same to Newtonian physics. And so it goes.

Now, let’s return to our earlier question. QWERTYUIOP is the upper row of letters on a computer keyboard. Do you think that is the most efficient keyboard configuration? You should say: No. In fact, this configuration was developed in 1870 to slow down fast operators to prevent typewriter keys from jamming. Nowadays, we mostly use computers instead of manual typewriters, and computer keys obviously don’t jam. But QWERTYUIOP continues to be used even though faster configurations are available.

My tip: Develop an eye for spotting sacred cows. With all the technological progress and change in the world, there are plenty of sacred cows to be sent to the slaughterhouse to make life simpler or to create space for the new. For instance, a few months ago I decided to slaughter the sacred cow watch. I no longer wear one, as anyone can do without a watch if you have a mobile phone.

Conclusion: Doing reality checks, testing assumptions, breaking rules for fools, and slaughtering a sacred cow whose day has come are common strategies of an accomplished creative thinker. Always remember the words of the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

Dr Detlef Reis is a university lecturer for Business Creativity and Innovation Leadership at the College of Management, Mahidol University. He is also the Founding Director of Thinkergy Limited (http://www.Thinkergy.com), the Idea Company in Asia. He can be reached at dr.d@Thinkergy.com