These are your rules, break them!

Congratulations on your promotion. Here’s your cap and badge. I just made 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 the statistics: If your army is facing superior force in the conventional way, 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 warfare spanning 200 years of human history, are gone. above to a whopping 63.3 percent. That’s a change from ‘probably lose’ to ‘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 industry giants if you act unconventionally. Sometimes breaking the right rules can land you an industry on a platter.

Rules and norms accumulate over time.

As we explore the art of strategic rule breaking, this insight is important: no system tends naturally to simplicity. Left to evolve, all 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 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 norms. 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’s what he saved Apple upon his return to the company. But it meant saying no to many things. No to a wide range of products: keep it simple. No extra buttons: keep it simple. No to excessive complexity: the system must be easy and intuitive to operate.

Eliminating clutter, resisting the advance of additional complexity, and dissolving outdated rules requires a champion of simplicity.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 just annoying, sometimes even comical (Google the little britain play ‘The computer says no’). But is that justification enough to start a campaign to review your systems?

Turns out we can do much 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 can be helpful as you begin to persuade others to your point of view. Why not present it at your next staff meeting? Ask attendees if they have seen actual examples of each idea. Let your passionate discussion begin to drive 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 stacking rule upon rule and even a simple procedure can become unreasonably slow. The slower things happen, the greater the total torpor.

Sometimes useful things are not allowed to happen because a rule absolutely 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 vetting 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 willingness to do them wanes. People perceive that going further is too much trouble. They are trained and conditioned to actively reduce their contribution.

With slowing down and increasing procedures, the word ‘no’ is being 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 higher 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 accumulate.

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 sustain a sense of helplessness and frustration long enough, you could bleed off 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 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 off, which precludes the possibility of smart cuts that can match exponential growth. Multiply this behavior and eventually no risks are 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 going against 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 happen incrementally in your organization, if at all.

They also introduce all the inherent dangers of a giant who cannot adapt to change.

Think of it like an old steam locomotive, racing with irresistible momentum on established rail lines. You can run your giant at optimized perfection, but if you’re the Kodak of your industry, making movies, and you can’t adapt your optimized perfection to the new digital reality, your optimized giant will perform, perfectly and unhesitatingly, with great irresistible momentum. , right on the edge of a precipice. Disruption kills dinosaurs that can’t adapt.

What rules does your organization hold to, for no other reason than the fact that the rules have always existed? What if you appointed yourself to champion the drive toward greater simplicity and agility? After all, they are your rules. You can break them. And those who do it strategically gain the leverage to topple the industry giants. They give themselves the space they need to create a truly disruptive innovation.