Organisations(especially the big ones) revel in herd mentality thinking. That birds of the same feather must flock together. Swayed by the wisdom of the crowds. Or collective bias? If ain’t broke, why mend it? They stick their neck out to maintain the status quo. Their obsessive love affair is with the state of impasse.
The SOS( Sea of Sameness) is a derivative of the increasingly commoditised world we inhabit.
But, if we are leading a project or leading a company, especially a large one, part of our core responsibility is rewrite the default. To rock the boat. To hoover away the legacy mindsets and bring new perspectives and fresh ideas in.
Leaders and entrepreneurs face two vastly different kinds of risks. One is that their organisation took a moonshot, braved the odds and made a bold move. In the process, the project bombs or in other words , they sink the ship. The other kind of risk is that their organization could have taken a risk and reaped handsome rewards, but they let the opportunity pass. In another sense, they miss the boat.
Needless to say, the most remarkable ideas are counter intuitive. They go against the flow. Forget Blue Ocean, they are actually Green Swans. Or Purple Cows. Playing it safe is fraught with the highest risk.
As Michelangelo famously said, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”
In a very real sense, the first job of leadership is to identify and overcome the costs of complacency.We don’t want to indulge in a trade off- where one sacrifices the remarkable parts of an idea in exchange for the comfort of a smoother ride.
High time to think higher, better. New thinking brings in new possibilities.