It’s redundant to say that our world is run by convention, but it is necessary to shine a light on just how sticky convention is.
I’ll start with a relevant example. When people are tasked with making a presentation, there’s a whole set of conventions that pop up. The templates themselves confine them from the start. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just one to notice.
We’re shown blank slides with placeholders for pictures and text, often bullet points. That shapes how we place the content. We have expectations about what constitutes a presentation – how long it should be, the size of the font, the use of graphics and animation. We have a way of thinking about how presentations should go, and when preparing we consider how far we dare stray from the norm.
Once in a while, we get sparks of inspiration that suggest new ways of doing things. Things that buck convention. Those are the times when we’re made viscerally aware of the unwritten rules.
But why are they rules?
That’s something to consider. They might be perfectly sound and valid. Thousands of years of wisdom and experience has taught us this lesson, and we defy it at our own peril. Or, just maybe, there’s something here that wasn’t in the original calculation.
In The Dark Knight, Joker tells a particularly aggrieved Harvey Dent that “Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying.” Despite Joker’s obvious criminal insanity and penchant for chaos, he touches on a point that resonates throughout the story.
We’re used to things going a certain way. Wars, robberies, corporate takeovers, epidemics, and product launches all unfold with a familiarity that we take in stride. When something happens outside our collective expectations, we are shocked.
Then, of course, we fold that new exception into our collection of things that can happen. Everyone is now completely accustomed to taking off their shoes at the airport, for example. We know that exhaustive pharmaceutical ads are just part of watching TV. We speak of “dialing” phone numbers when nobody has done such a thing since the last century.
Newer generations won’t even be aware that these are new conventions, or that there was ever a difference. This affects how they’ll imagine what is possible, just as there are many things we either don’t know or don’t consider are part of our reality. We don’t or can’t know what it is we’re missing.
Sometimes we don’t have occasion to consider if the plan is horrifying. Or just ill-considered, a quick patch-up to address a problem that won’t be solved. Some problems get baked in early, and become institutional – like when all forms of communication on a given platform are weighted the same.
Think about any medications you might take. How many of them were developed for the specific purpose for which it was prescribed to you? The antidepressant that helps smokers quit. The pain reliever that is also used for heart issues. Antihistamines that help with anxiety.
Here’s the thing: Many medications and other useful compounds were developed for some other purpose, and it’s entirely a matter of marketing that we think of something like Sucralose as a sweetener rather than a potential insecticide. It’s why Listerine is a mouthwash, not a surgical antiseptic. Bubble wrap is a packaging material and fun diversion, not the 3D wallpaper it was intended to be.
It’s all made up
So many things in our daily lives exist under a label that is entirely fabricated, and continue to do so only because we allow their definitions to persist. Most of the time, that’s fine. That’s how we get through every day with some sort of normalcy.
All day, every day, we go about our lives never having to deal with the underlying concepts of money, language, street numbering, laws, or measurements. All these things are made up by humans, but we occupy it without pondering it the way a fish does water.
It’s when you start noticing and concentrating on those conventions that you run into trouble. Well, sometimes trouble and sometimes a brilliant paradigm-shifting discovery. Either one is going to ruffle feathers somewhere.
Suppose you found a way to use the built-in clip art widget as a searchable screenshot library for the whole company? You’d get a bit of inaction on adoption, but also resistance from team members who don’t visualize what you’re trying to accomplish. Detractors will point out the potential flaws, and there’s almost always someone who just doesn’t like change.
All of these things are learning opportunities, right alongside the original idea that inspired them. They are foreseeable responses to something that can be a disappointing footnote in the story of your career, or an exciting new chapter that you are choosing to write.
So when you see a new idea, know that it might sound ridiculous to you right now. It might continue to be ridiculous (like using nukes to dig the Suez Canal). If you take a discerning look at the idea and its intention, though, you can usually find another version of the idea that works.
CHO: Chief Headhunting Officer
A quick anecdote to expand on this. I once worked with an advertising executive who told me of a client that was looking to gain ground on a competitor. The competitor was outmaneuvering them at every turn, and they needed bold new ideas to get ahead. One of the managers, stumped for ideas, asked his young daughter what she would do. Presumably fresh off a Grimm fairy tale, she said to find the person at the other company who was making all the smart decisions and kill them.
Obviously, the team did not do this. They did, however, hire that brilliant person away and turned the company in a positive direction. The ability to identify metaphorical suggestions in a glib remark made a difference.
Here’s a bonus insight riffing on the assassination hire. What if it’s not true? Consultant lore is full of stories meant to illuminate some principle, like the 5 Monkeys Experiment, in which purportedly the current occupants of a cage know they will be sprayed with water if they attempt to grab the bananas at the top of a ladder. When a new monkey comes along and goes for the bananas, the rest will restrain them. Continue replacing the monkeys until none are left who recall the spraying, but they will continue the prohibition of banana-getting despite not knowing why.
The story is false, with an element of truth behind it. Still, it’s false enough to call out any presenter using it as a model of social behavior.
Two things about this:
One: There’s a lesson in how we will stick to a story much like the imaginary monkeys, impacting each others’ lives for reasons we don’t fully comprehend. It’s a meta-lesson in conformity and compliance: We’ll compulsively tell each other false stories echoing the subjects in that false story because we want to share the lesson.
Two: Even a false story can inspire a search for a real example. Why does it ring true, and where can we find the authentic version behind it?
Nonetheless, one convention firmly established in our society is that this sort of truthiness will not only be repeated, it will be widely believed. It’s how we have urban legends.
“That’s just how it is.”
There’s a danger that supersedes “We’ve always done it this way”, and it is not even getting far enough to see the fact that we’ve always done it that way. It’s accepting without consideration that this is the way it’s done.
To borrow the analogy from earlier, a fish doesn’t think “I’ve always been swimming in water,” it doesn’t even know that it’s in water. What is the water we’re swimming in? And how would we ever find out?
You don’t think about the plumbing in your home when you get a glass of water. You just turn on the faucet and it works. What reason would you have on a regular basis to reconsider the way water gets into your building?
Now suppose you came up with a novel way of routing water. Pipes that clog and break are no longer an issue. Costly digging through floors and streets aren’t necessary. What do you do with this idea?
Immediately, you can predict the reaction. How would this work? How are you going to convince billions of people that this is the way to go? This is only a hypothetical example, and I find myself tearing it apart because I don’t see what could possibly replace pipes.
And that’s my point. I resist because I can’t see it.
Whatever the idea is, it doesn’t fit within my picture of the way things work.
“Nothing’s where you think it is.”
In an episode of The West Wing (Season 2, Episode 16), C.J. and Josh meet with cartographers who propose replacing the popular Mercator projection map with the Gall-Peters projection, which represents land masses more realistically.
At first they are skeptical and even dismissive, but the cartographers make their case that map size and position subtly influences perception of those areas.
Somewhere around the point where C.J. and Josh lean forward, they are becoming aware that they are subject to a convention we have shared around maps. This is how things are. For them, and most of us, there was never any need to consider the proportions of continents on a map. And suddenly a new bit of information dispossesses them of this notion.
The proposal in question goes from being a crackpot idea to something that deserves serious consideration.
Is Gall-Peters the best projection? There’s not a subjective way to answer the question. There are dozens and dozens of projections available, all born out of the impossibility of representing a spherical globe on a flat surface. We’ve had this ongoing problem of how to draw the world on a piece of paper, and over centuries came up with a solution that’s been workable enough.
It’s only when we’re confronted with the fact that there are alternatives that we lean forward and take notice. When someone tells us “the way it is” ain’t the only way it can be.
I’d love to tell you that having the ability to recognize this phenomenon would give you some tactical advantage when it comes along.
Sometimes it does, like when Bill Gates saw that with the burgeoning personal computer market, the operating system was precious property. Instead of selling it to IBM, he licensed it to them and laid the groundwork for his immense fortune.
Sometimes, even if temporarily, it only makes you part of the crowd that is now at odds with the status quo, like Galileo upsetting the Catholic Church and many contemporary astronomers by championing Copernican heliocentrism, the idea (already centuries old) that Earth revolves around the Sun. He was treated as a heretic for something that has been verified and is now common knowledge.
Does that mean keep your mouth shut if you’ve stumbled upon a revolutionary discovery? Not at all. When you catch flak about your astounding idea, in addition to gathering sufficient evidence you must address beliefs and norms that will prevent you from having a fair hearing. Track down the conventions that keep your idea from finding safe harbor.
