When The Norm Becomes the Blockage

A few days ago, one of my friends challenged me to start writing again, something I had put aside because I had started doubting myself and I started worrying about my positioning with my stakeholders. I had fallen into the conformity box, the concrete block which we build around us and in turn form the “routines” which push us farther away from adapting to change and remaining relevant in the current world.

This nudge pushed me to a story which I read a while ago and which I will re-share here, giving credit to the original authors. The story goes like this:

In a military base, there was a concrete slab that was guarded around the clock by four soldiers. This was a routine that had been in place for decades. Over the years, different Commanders were posted to the base, but the tradition remained the same with four soldiers changing shifts to guard the slab.

One day, a new Commander took over the unit and asked why the soldiers were guarding the concrete slab around the clock. He was told that the routine had been the tradition for years, and no one had questioned or bothered to change it.

Not satisfied with the answer, the Commander decided to go on a quest to find out why the soldiers were guarding the concrete slab. To his surprise, he discovered that years ago, a former Commander decided to build a platform, where events would be held. When the slab was laid, animals would walk all over it at night, leaving footprints, before it could dry.

This prompted the soldiers to patch up the holes. It happened over and over until the Commander asked four soldiers to guard the concrete slab for three weeks — day and night, to prevent the animals from walking over it.

A week after the order was given, the Commander was transferred to another unit. The new Commander who took over continued to uphold the tradition without asking any questions. Decades later, this continued to be the norm.

As it is said, routine is the enemy of time, and yet it is so easy to get into the stride and maintain altitude in that routine. This is true for the individual as it is true for the institution. The former CEO of Nokia is quoted to have ended his speech by saying, “we did nothing wrong, but somehow we lost.” Nokia had reached cruising altitude in their business, their systems working well, at least they thought, but the environment around them had changed, the concrete slab had dried, but they kept their soldiers on guard, not even aware of what or why they were on guard.

As I revive the journey of sharing my thoughts through writing and stepping into a new territory of blogging, you and I will go down a journey of thought-provoking conversations, leveraging on various lessons learnt within and without the corporate world, with the hope that we get to identify the concrete blocks which we have been unnecessarily guarding within our personal and work lives.