The Pike & The Minnow: Why We Keep Obsessing Over Mediocre “Best Practices”
This is an excerpt of my weekly Unthinkable newsletter. Every Monday, get one new idea for trusting your intuition to do better work. There are plenty of “best practices,” and they lead to average work. This is an attempt to do better.
One reason conventional thinking is so common is that it seems logical. That best practice or previous precedent feels incredibly strategic. Even if you fight and kick against that stuff, you have to admit: An expert explaining their latest 7-step process always makes a lot of sense. Each time, it’s the same, seemingly sound argument:
Given THIS reality, you take THAT path.
Often times, when experts debate, they focus on the second part: the path forward.
But what if the first part is really at fault? What if the reality we’re asked to accept … isn’t real?
Now, I don’t mean to imply that we’re living in the Matrix. We aren’t. (Wait, are we? Like, hold on a second: Have you seen the films? Because … are we? No. We’re not. Right? Right. No. Yes? No. Okay…)
No, what I mean is this: We’ve been conditioned to think that exceptional ideas could never work in our situation. Given THIS reality — this boss, this team, this industry, this goal — all of THAT stuff is far out of reach. It’s hard to find and even harder to implement. So just try the tried-and-true. Use the best practice. That’s the stuff that works … in reality.
But what if we’re just not seeing reality for what it REALLY is?
Consider the tale of the pike and the minnow.
Imagine a pike swimming around in a fish tank. If you drop in a minnow, the pike will immediately try to eat it. Time after time, if you add a minnow to that tank, the pike snaps it up.
But if you lowered a minnow into the tank inside a glass cup, something interesting happens: The pike can’t see the glass, so it keeps bumping into it every time it tries to eat the minnow. After awhile, it gives up. It’s been conditioned to believe that minnows simply aren’t things it can eat.
From then on, minnows can swim right by the pike’s nose, and it won’t even budge.
We are that pike, and we’ve been conditioned the same way throughout our careers:
- We accept average solutions to our problems at work, because that’s what we’re used to.
- We repeat the tried-and-fine, because we’re each trying to be a “VER-RY IM-PORT-TANT BUSY-NESS PER-SON.”
- We consume boring-as-sin business podcasts. They’re so common, that we actually begin to convince ourselves of things like, “Business information doesn’t need to be enjoyable.” (That one was for me…)
Everyone else’s obsession with best practices has lowered this glass around our aspirations and ideas. They say to us, “That sounds nice in theory, but our team… our budget… our goals…”
We could never do those things. Hell, we could never even come up with those things! We may as well find a more attainable meal. All those creative little minnows swimming right in front of you can’t possibly be eaten.
Allow me to introduce a land mammal to our aquatic metaphor: BULL!
We all have what it takes to do better work. We’re just not executing against it. We’re bought into the lie that, even though our intuition urges us to snap at those minnows, we should just stay in our swim lanes instead.
But what if that’s not reality? What if that’s a load of bull- and fish- and every-other-animal doo-doo?
Because maybe creativity is within reach. Maybe your experiments won’t get you fired. Maybe your boss would respond positively. Maybe your customers would enjoy that thing you’re creating. Maybe the key isn’t some expert telling you there is no glass, and so you should instead nudge your nose forward and realize, oh my goodness, there is no painful bump!
Today on the show, we dive deeper into the story of the Pike and the Minnow with Clair Byrd and Clark Valberg, two of the people behind a stunning creative project called Design Disruptors. Best of all, as marketers, they made that project seem like the obvious, strategic action to take — one that was right in front of their noses — instead of writing yet another how-to blog post or any of the typical best practices in content marketing.
From the outside looking in, their work will seem big, bold, and brave. At first glance, what they did looks pretty darn unthinkable. But when you hear their side of the story, I hope you’ll realize: Great work is attainable. Every day, dozens of chances go swimming by our noses, ready for us to snap them up.
So let’s eat.
Season 3, Episode 4: “The Pike And The Minnow”
Nobody actually takes risks, especially in business, so what if the key to doing better work is making unconventional paths seem SAFER than the best practice? That’s exactly what Clair Byrd, Clark Valberg, and the team behind Design Disruptors did. They took a massive project in scope and found a way to make each step seem safer than the last. They built a refreshing, eye-opening project without ever changing their team’s goals. They did everything we aspire to do in our work in a way that seems, well, anything BUT Unthinkable.
