You Don't Repeat What Worked. You Repeat What Survived.

There's a reason you lead the way you do. A reason you run the meetings you run, have the conversations you have, avoid the ones you avoid.

You think it's because of what worked.

It isn't.

It's because of what survived. Or, as I like to put it: we keep doing what seems to work, and what fails to fail.

The latter category is bigger than you think, and it's a problem.

Adler's word for it was adequate. Not optimal. Not ideal. Adequate. And adequacy is often defined as the absence of obvious failure.

Here's how it gets worse. Our adequate patterns not only survive, but through discomfort avoidance, we unconsciously seek out conditions familiar to the pattern so they can keep running undisturbed. Adequate loops for which we choose adequate conditions so they keep running.

And loops can start fast. As long as our response doesn't fail, then that response is more easily activated next time, or automatically deploys. And if it fails to fail in 3-5 iterations, congratulations. You have a loop. Not necessarily because it works, but because it failed to fail.

The root problem: we treat the absence of breakage as permission to look elsewhere for growth. Which means something has to break before we'll change.

The alternative strategy is this: identify the 20% of your actions that drive 80% of the results, and divide the other 80% into 3 buckets.

1. Comfort: you do it because you like doing it.
2. Triage: you do it because someone or something triggers you to do it.
3. Inertia: it's not a big driver of results, you don't do it because you like it, and you don't do it because you have to. You do it because you've done it before. It doesn't mean it's bad, although it may be. It definitely means it's worth examination.

For your category 1 findings, price the comfort. Doing what we like to do has value. Consider the opportunity cost against the value of doing what you like and make a judgement call.

For your category 2 findings, price the disruption. Is it a part of the sustainable cost of being in a system that's never perfect? Or have you learned to tolerate something you don't need to? Where and how can you remove yourself from an external loop that either doesn't need to involve you or doesn't need to be as messy as it is?

For your category 3 findings, price the space this work takes up in your calendar. It marks the room you have to experiment. Find out how you can do this work differently: batching, delegating, using tech, adding a skill or dropping it entirely.

Keep in mind: none of the material in your 80% directly drives your most important results. The only way it can get your attention is by breaking, or because you choose to look there and start breaking some of it. Not because it's bad (necessarily), but because it's not working well enough, or because you simply don't know whether it is.

And in our increasingly marginless world, looking at this 80% may be the largest canvas you've got for change.

So the question isn't whether your defaults are broken. The question is: if they weren't working well enough, or even serving a purpose, would you even know?

Just because a pattern doesn't break doesn't mean it works. And it certainly doesn't mean it deserves to keep its space.

It just means that so far, it's failed to fail outright.

If you want to think tank how you could redeploy some of your 80%, use my booking link to schedule a time.

Best,

C

Running this kind of analysis is harder alone. I work with groups of 7–12 CEOs, founders and owners who do it together. Let's book a 30-minute conversation.