PRACTICE
6
Disrupt Routines

Always remember, your focus determines your reality.

—George Lucas

Here’s a story that comes from a book about family therapy.¹

A couple were having problems with their teenage son. He was being defiant and belligerent. The parents tried to curtail his behavior, but the harder they came down on him, the more defiant he got. They were to the point where they were going to start calling the police, that’s how bad it was. It was a classic doom loop.

One of the things that was happening was that he would stay out late at night.

The therapist told them, “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to tell him, ‘Look, we’d like you to be home by ten, but we realize there is nothing we can do about it. But we’d really like you to be home by ten.’

“And when he doesn’t get home by ten, lock the doors, turn out the lights, and go to bed. Don’t wait up.

“Then, when he does eventually come home, let him knock or ring the doorbell for a while, and then come down after a bit and open the door. At first, act really sleepy, pretend that you don’t recognize him, and then recognize him, and just apologize, say, ‘Oh, sorry, son, I’m so sorry, come on in,’ and then just go back to bed like it’s no big deal.

“If he doesn’t make his bed, I want you to make his bed for him, but spill crackers in it or something like that, and if later he complains about the crackers, just say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, son, I was eating crackers when I made your bed and some of them must have gotten in there.’”

What was going on? The therapist realized that the parent’s “solution” of clamping down on the kid was just making the problem worse. The son was rebelling against their authority. Taking away the authority—in a way that didn’t really make him happy—left the son with nothing to rebel against. If he wanted to get in the house without trouble, he would need to get home on time. If he didn’t want crackers in his bed, he needed to make it, and so on.

The parents had a belief: That the son was out of control, and the solution was to reassert control. In order to change the situation, they needed to change their belief that by asserting control they would help their son learn self-control. They needed to get outside the situation and look at how they were influencing it.

Sometimes, the solution makes the problem worse; that’s when you get a real conundrum. What do you do? You have to step outside the problem, and then you have to start looking at the solution as well as the problem; and often, the answer to solving that problem is not attacking the problem, itself, but attacking the solution.

We spend so much time on autopilot. Sometimes, when a problem seems intractable, there’s an invisible routine at work, and simply disrupting that routine, even in random ways, can shift the situation and allow you to see it in new ways.

As I’ve been writing this book I have been sharing the draft with my wife, Michelle, and she has been putting the principles to work at home. She told me this story about disrupting routines.

Our son Isaac has been spending a lot of time playing video games, and it has become a problem that sometimes distracts him from doing his homework or keeps him up late at night.

One night as she was going to bed, she heard Isaac in his room playing a game online with friends. She thought, “Okay, what is my typical, autopilot routine?”

Her typical pattern would be to knock on the door and go in there, telling him to stop playing and go to bed. This invariably would end in a fight. So she decided to disrupt that routine and see what happened.

She went downstairs and unplugged the Wi-Fi router. Once in a while, it conks out all on its own, and the only way to restart it is to unplug it and plug it back in. Then she waited there, in the dark, next to the router.

Isaac came down and walked toward the router to restart it, and when he saw her there, after an initial shock, he got it immediately. He just looked at her, then down at the floor. He said, “Sorry,” turned around and went right back upstairs to bed.

What happened there? She was disrupting a typical pattern not by attacking the problem, but by attacking her typical solution to the problem. The disruption of their typical pattern changed the dynamic completely.

Sometimes a routine is so ingrained and habitual that it has become embedded in the physical environment, and is almost invisible.

Here’s an example.

Hunter Industries is a company that makes irrigation and sprinkler systems that are driven by software. The software developers at Hunter Industries worked in cubicles and when they wanted to have a meeting, they needed to book a meeting room. Meeting rooms at Hunter Industries were at a premium, so you were not allowed to book them for more than two hours. Sounds pretty basic, right? Not unreasonable.

A guy named Woody Zuill was brought into Hunter Industries to manage that software team. When he first arrived at Hunter, Woody noticed that his team was stressed out, and they were spending a lot of time in meetings. They were having meetings on top of meetings, and even with all those meetings, the software, which was pretty complex, was breaking a lot. So whenever something broke, they would need to have even more meetings to figure out what was going on.

Woody disrupted the routine, but in a very small way. He is a very collaborative guy and not a top-down manager, so he started making time for the team to reflect and think about their problems, asking them what they thought they should do, and doing his best to make it possible.

One of the things they did was to institute a kind of weekly learning time, where on Friday afternoons they would book a meeting room, with a laptop and a projector, and people would show each other the things that they knew. They would pass the laptop back and forth. It was a nice way to spend a Friday afternoon, and the team members were learning a lot from each other.

One Friday the team got together to meet about a large, complex project they were working on, and they started to talk about the project and who needed to do what, but pretty soon they started passing the laptop back and forth like they did in their weekly learning meetings. After an hour and a half, their meeting time was up, someone else was coming in for another meeting, and they all looked at each other and said, “Well, we’re not done yet, so let’s book another meeting room.”

So they booked another room and kept on with their meeting. It was actually turning into a kind of working meeting, because they were not just talking to each other, they were actually making progress on the project at the same time. They continued like this for the rest of the day, going from meeting room to meeting room and moving the project forward together.

The next week, Woody blocked out meeting rooms all day, every day, and the team was literally going from room to room, meeting and working, and getting a lot done at the same time. After a week of this, they figured it was time to get a room where they could do this permanently.

It took them about three weeks to find a room where they could keep working like this, and now they do it this way pretty much all the time.

So what happened there?

There was a tacit, unspoken, underlying belief that permeated the entire company: the idea that “meeting is not working.” This belief was so habitual and embedded that it had been built into the routines and even the physical structure of work, in the form of cubicles, which were “for work,” and meeting rooms, which were “for meetings” and needed to be booked and scheduled.

By creating space for reflection, Woody disrupted that routine. At the same time, he created a safe space for learning and reflection, a kind of playful space, which opened up some wiggle room for a new way of working to emerge—a way of working that combined meetings and work into a single activity.

In one sense, they are meeting all the time. They are always in a meeting. But in another sense, they have done away with meetings altogether, because they are always working, too.

The results have been so dramatic that Woody is now in demand all over the world, where he teaches people this new way of working, which he has dubbed “mob programming.”

Life is full of these kinds of patterns and routines. Over time they become invisible.

Think about your route to work. If you’re like me, you take that trip on autopilot. You take the same route every day, so you see the same things, and over time it gets to the point where you don’t even notice them. But if there is construction or something and that road is blocked, you are forced to find a new way, and you are inevitably going to pay attention in new ways and notice new things.

You can do this intentionally in other parts of your life as well. Whenever you find yourself stuck in any kind of recurring pattern, try something random. Anything you can do that throws that train off the rails will create new openings and might help you see the whole situation in a new way. Just do something different.

PRACTICE 6
Disrupt routines.

Many beliefs are embedded in habitual routines that run on autopilot. Disrupt the routine to create new possibilities.