Fractured Rules

Breaking business rules to activate creative thinking

If you're not getting the results you want, try breaking - or at least twisting - some of the "golden rules" that guide your typical approach to business. Write your challenge as succinctly as possible. Then look for ways to break your business rules (well established ways of thinking and working) in ways that lead to new and better approaches. For example:

Business Rule: Meet or exceed your goals.

Fracture the Rule: Question your goals.

See Possibilities: Ask "why" it is important to meet this goal. Ask why that is important. And then why that is important. Is there a way to reframe your goal so that it focuses your energy on an issue that will have a more important impact? When chopping firewood, aiming for the top of the log can produce chips, splinters and other dangerous things. You get the cleanest, most productive cuts when you aim for the chopping block beneath the log.

Business Rule: Be professional.

Fracture the Rule: Be passionate.

See Possibilities: What's the most important thing in your life today? If this was being threatened, how would you respond? How could you meet your business challenge in a similar way? Male senior executives began supporting women at more senior ranks when they saw how the status quo was impacting their talented, hard working daughters. How could you link your challenge to something major stakeholders personally care most about?

Business Rule: Focus on the customer.

Fracture the Rule: Focus on the customer's environment.

See Possibilities: How could you create opportunities to shadow or observe the "customer" of your challenge to better understand the context in which the challenge occurs? How could impacting what the customer experiences as a precedent or consequence of the challenge be helpful?

Business Rule: Develop a product funnel.

Fracture the Rule: Develop a solution funnel.

See Possibilities: Product funnels engage consumers by demonstrating how you add value at successively greater levels of investment. At each level, experiencing real value motivates the customer to move to deeper levels of investment and receive greater value. How could you create a series of impact-ful solutions, beginning with those that require little/no risk and moving on to those requiring greater levels of investment?

Business Rule: Play to win.

Fracture the Rule: Playing is winning.

See Possibilities: What kinds of activities have no scorecard, and are rewarding just because you do it? Regularly engaging in non-competitive pursuits can help you and your colleagues lower mental and social barriers to more generative thinking. Author Paul Plesek suggests that laughter may be triggered by a biochemical response to two previously unrelated concepts colliding. The next time you spontaneously laugh out loud, stop to identify the germ of the joke. How could you use this new concept to your advantage?

Business Rule: Hire the best talent.

Fracture the Rule: Rent and borrow diverse talents.

See Possibilities: How could you invite others with completely different areas of domain expertise to work with you on finding a new solution? How could you help yourself pay more attention to the ideas of those who don't fit your preconceived notions of excellence?

Business Rule: Close the deal.

Fracture the Rule: Stay open to other possibilities.

See Possibilities: Once you know you've landed on the right idea, set it aside for a while. While you're away from it, create a completely different kind of solution. There's no pressure, you already have a great solution. Approaching your challenge from a less-pressured mindset may open you up to interesting new possibilities. When you come back to your original great solution, look for ways to improve it… or to combine the original solution and the new, different kind of solution

Business Rule: Execute according to plan.

Fracture the Rule: Borrow from the rules of 'improv'.  If you're implementing something truly new, your advance planning an educated guess.  As you implement your change, the goal is to get successively smarter; readily adjusting your strategies and helping others do the same.

See Possibilities: How could you craft your implementation plan as a series of experiments? In good improv, you "play off lines." Rather than going into a scene with a set agenda, you listen to what others say and base your next line from that. Where could this practice be especially helpful as you implement your new idea?

Business Rule: Deflect the naysayers.

Fracture the Rule: Befriend the naysayers.

See Possibilities Resistance is a form of motivated energy. Learn more about the needs that motivate their resistance. How can you use this information to help you improve or market your idea?

Now it's your turn:

Business Rule: (what golden rules have always worked best for you?)

Fracture the Rule: (how could you state them in a sideways or fractured form?)

See Possibilities: (if this fractured rule was golden, what could you do?)

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