What Happens When You Don’t Breakaway From Patterns?
Edition #127
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
The Hagakure #84: Are You Successful?
In this lovely article, Paulo André, CTO of Resquared and Leadership coach, shares his thoughts on what it means to be successful.
Here are some thoughts for you to think and reflect on:
Success is primarily a result of three things - 1. Results. 2. How those results are achieved. 3. How you make people feel.
In a complex system it is the interactions between the parts (i.e. the relationships between the people) that yield the biggest impact on results.
If people are not intrinsically motivated and aligned with who they are and what they value, nothing else will (really) work.
A company is responsible to employees, not for employees. But it can't be responsible for making them happy—just as it can't be responsible for keeping them entertained or interested.
In the workplace, the act of gardening is striving every day to create the conditions for people to feel like this is the place to be.
You can read the entire entire article here.
Finding Greatness In Non-Consensus.
In this thought-provoking conversation, Samir Kaji and Mike Maples discuss the importance of finding founders who are pattern breakers. While the discussion is largely around founders and startups, there are great lessons for established, successful companies and professionals working in large companies on why it is imperative for them to be ‘Pattern Breakers’.
Here are some key takeaways from this conversation:
You have to invest in the authenticity of the founder, the future they are pursuing, and their insight about that future.
If you are too attached to the product to what it is, you will tend to miss the real signals wherever they come from. You have to be aware of this blind spot if you get too attached to the product.
Mike Maples discusses the concept of finding Founder-Future Fit. To succeed in the future, you must notice or observe things better than others. The idea is to understand if the founder is living in that future.
A flash of insight happens only when you think about it all the time.
Early believers are likely to join somebody who they believe is an authentic person from the future—somebody who lives, breathes, and eats that future. Only such founders attract early believers.
How do you break free from pattern matching? There is a bias introduced by pattern matching, which is one of the reasons you do not see the possibilities of the other patterns.
The importance of having a ‘Beginner’s mind’ is vital so that you do not fall a prey to patterns.
A startup capitalist wins not by ‘Persistently Compounding’ his capital or not just by making things incrementally better but by denying the premise of the existing rules!
Startups succeed when customers get something they have not had before or cannot be compared with what they have now or had in the past.
Look for ideas that embody inflections because inflections allows you to change the subject or the ground rules and create a new playbook.
Inflection plus insight is key to identifying breakthrough concepts and successful ideas.
Great founders backcast. They find a radically different future.
If your idea is too much like a consensus, you are already too much like the people you know or are around, which means your profit gets arbitraged.
You can listen to the entire episode at:
Global Population Box by Box
In this TED Talk, Hans Rosling, the world-renowned Swedish physician, academic, and public speaker, gives a masterclass on storytelling with data. He uses a brand new analog teaching technology, boxes he picked from IKEA. He presents how the world population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years, with the help of these boxes and artefacts, to tell the story in a compelling manner.
Here are some key takeaways from the talk:
Think and find creative ways to simplify complex information and present it in a lucid manner so people can first understand and then remember it for life.
When you present data and facts through an act of physical demonstration, it can trigger the imagination of the audience much better than a cold presentation of numbers. It can stimulate their brain to get engaged and raise their levels of interest and curiosity.
When you use the support of artefacts and things to represent the scale of any problem, it can create a very powerful impact on the listeners to empathise with the problem and also make you listen and become aware of genuine feedback. It also makes you take the first step towards a change or transformation.
Just PowerPoint or Excel skills alone will not make the cut for great storytelling. If you can learn to combine a bunch of ‘hybrid’ presentation skills, using artefacts to bring to life insights and further leverage digital technologies to present your data and information dynamically, you can create a lasting impact on the audience.
The question you must ask yourself - ‘How much time do I spend putting the data together’ vis-a-vis ‘How much time do I spend thinking about how will I tell the story?’
Click the above video to watch and learn more.
What Happens When You Don’t Breakaway From Patterns?
When you don’t break away from patterns, you create a world of commodities or look-alikes.
What is a commodity?
A commodity is an identical set of products or services, and there are virtually no differentiators between them, irrespective of the producer or the creator. Since there is very little to differentiate between the products or services, it is difficult to extract a premium, gain faster growth, or make disproportionate profits.
What does pattern-led thinking do?
It just assumes that there is a standard operating model. It creates constraints in your head by thinking within boundaries and generally accepted norms. It does not question or even consider if there is an alternative way of thinking or doing the same thing. It assumes nothing different can be done. It does not question and challenge fundamental assumptions. It encourages less risk-taking, and one is extremely averse to any failure or mistakes. It attempts to make small incremental changes that are sometimes not very visible, and in the end, there is no material impact or difference.
Pattern thinking creates ‘default product ideas’ and ones that are pretty similar to somebody else’s. This is the reason you have difficulty in differentiating the benefits of products or services in any category. If you give this some thought, the truth will become more and more apparent.
There is a world of commodities around you.
Take a look at some of these examples:
Every mall looks almost the same, and all the stores within the different malls look the same. There is a standard sales or customer experience process that is ‘pattern patented’. You pretty much know there are season arrivals, season sales, new arrivals, birthday offers, and anniversary specials, and these are patterns that are replicable with no difference. A majority of the retail industry represents a commodity playbook.
There are also a bunch of other products or service commodities out there, with little to differentiate - banks, credit cards, cars, consumer durables like refrigerators, washing machines, TVs, mobile phones, or even take a look at CPG products, like soaps, detergents, etc. Most of these companies have mastered the art of ‘Persistenly Compounding’ with very little incremental value to show.
Therefore, customers are indifferent to many of these commodity brands. They are not willing to pay a premium because there is no difference in paying extra for them, and there is also no incremental value. Pattern thinking creates commodities that are blind spots for customers.
Breaking Commodity Pattern Thinking Principles
Tesla was a ‘pattern breaker’ within the global automotive industry. Hence, it was no surprise when Tesla EV succeeded because it was a disruptive product not seen in the industry for many decades.
Similarly, the Apple Watch was a ‘pattern breaker’ in terms of how watches were generally designed, conceived, bought, and used before the introduction of the Apple Watch.
In India, NPCI developed UPI(Unified Payment Interface), which questioned the fundamental principle of how payments were made earlier. It was a ‘pattern breaker’ when it came to how payments were done and settled.
Netflix was a ‘pattern breaker’ in how entertainment was subscribed to, accessed, and consumed before its launch.
Therefore, it is important to get people who have a ‘pattern-breaking’ mindset within different functions in businesses and across levels in every company. These people will be able to see and envision what others cannot. Hence, it can help companies truly innovate, drive growth and create value.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
Relationships between people yield the biggest impact on results in a company.
Look for Founder-Future fit in early-stage startups.
Find creative ways, along with analog-based teaching methods, to powerfully storytell with data.