Breaking Habits for Fun and Profit

You may have wondered why “No Map” is part of the name of this Web site. After all, how successful can any entrepreneur or physical adventurer be without a plan?

We think of maps as things we use for guidance, but they’re also things we create. We can’t “know” reality, so instead, we create maps, or models, of our worlds. After a while the use of our maps becomes so habitual that we’re not really aware of the maps at all.

This is a good thing, in some ways. It saves us time and conscious thought. But when it comes to making changes in our lives, or to innovating, it seems like following the familiar routes plotted on our mental maps may not be as useful.
Along these lines, ponder the observation that fuels the premise of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder:

“Almost every practical exploration of how we can improve our lives, businesses, and societies suggests ways to be either more ordered or differently ordered. Being disordered—and not just less centrally or hierarchically ordered—rarely comes up for consideration.”

Authors Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman then go on to do just that: to consider the benefits of being disordered. Their book is a fascinating read, and their conclusions resonate with this idea of freeing yourself from your maps. Why? Because some disorder, Abrahamson and Freedman explain, leads to better solutions.

If you’ve read any “success literature” over the past few decades (Stephen Covey, David Allen, etc.), you probably know how important setting goals, making plans, and then following them is to achievement. Without a clear destination, a plan, and the ability to stay on track, how can you succeed efficiently—if at all?

Well, Abrahamson and Freedman raise some interesting questions about this commonly accepted wisdom regarding the importance of focus. Two of my favorites:

“How do you know that the things you are excluding from your life as time wasters are really time wasters if you’re excluding them from your life? And why do so many interesting and successful people have backgrounds that are brimming with inconsistency, false starts, and career twists?”

They go on to cite the work of Ben Fletcher, a British psychologist and business consultant. In his work helping managers become more flexible and tolerant, Fletcher found that while the managers could understand and accept the need to change the way they interacted with subordinates, they could rarely actually do so. Fletcher’s theory? That people are so conditioned to act the same way every day, that much of our behavior—even what we know is bad behavior—is habitual.

So instead of asking the managers to make big changes in their workplace style, he instead asked them to alter smaller behaviors that were easier to change. Things like changing the route they took to work, what they ate for lunch, where they sat in meetings. The goal was to simply have the managers vary their everyday behavior a bit. The results were surprising. In just a matter of weeks, throwing little “monkey wrenches” into their daily routines enabled the managers to also change the way they interacted with their subordinates.

We’re all stuck in “habit webs,” concluded Fletcher, and the only way to get unstuck is to first cut the individual supporting strands a bit, to loosen the web for bigger changes. “New behaviors, he says, “lead to new experiences, and eventually that helps people change the way they think.”

Fletcher took his “Do Something Different” theories from management consulting into a more lucrative field: dieting. His “No Diet Diet” focuses on teaching people how to become more flexible in life as a whole, instead of just focusing on changing eating habits. You can read more about Fletcher’s work and his “Framework for Internal Transformation” on the nodietdietway Web site.

“No Map” is about dealing with uncertainty and the messiness of life. It’s also about courting it. So, ditch your maps. Make an effort every day to stop walking through life habitually. Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand today, and you might be surprised by what you’re capable of tomorrow.