IF THE MOUSE ROARS, THE TIGER STARVES
“Our job is to survive not explore,” said the CAO. Let me say it again – “OUR JOB IS TO SURVIVE NOT EXPLORE.” It’s a profound statement of the small ball that bedevils the highest aspiration for the work we do.
Most of us start jobs with great exuberance – powerful tigers of the animal kingdom. If we are youthful, it’s double the pleasure to watch the tempest in a storm of awesomely naïve belief that the world can all change tomorrow in the design of our imagination. But even when we are more grizzled, we enter new jobs all hopey and changey. Beehives of energy. Clarity of conviction. Idealistic. Ideas-driven. Positive. Charging forward to change the world in the sandbox we have ownership of. Aiming to make that sandbox a beach.
And then…our sandbox gets filled by other housecats covering over their treasures. Within months of starting a new job our tiger heart is declawed. We have just enough grains of sand in the tank left to get between co-worker toes of life in the nuisance we cause for those who find us rebellious, or even worse – “not a team player” in the worst statement of performance irony there is.
Pause a moment to think about the cost of corporate culture that wears the original down. All those ideas and new processes. The new vision. All that potential for the incredible – lost.
“Rebellion” of the mind creates workplace discomfort in a bend away from the norm. “Too quick,” “too much,” “too big” is response from the corporate monolithic voice of supervisors and HR specialists who seek to soothe us. Subtle behind closed door, or loud on social media, shots at our armour of ambition start to take effect.
I’m reminded of my Star Trek watching days for the effect this has on the psyche: “I am Hugh. I am Borg. You will be assimilated.” Soon enough, we keep our head down. We go through the motions. We chew off the small as a matter of mental self-preservation. Our mouse roars while our tiger heart starves.
Deflated, we cat-scratch away in our cubicle, a paper tiger afterthought to traditionalists everywhere. We punch the time clock of life as the tick-tock of the sand in the hourglass reminds us that life unfulfilled…is slipping away. We are at work in body, but not in mind and spirit.
Our ailing corporate norm of pedantic “getting by” is fighting hard to prevail. But ask the Titanic if that was good strategy.
We need to find comfort in the discomfort. We need to drink from the firehose of change, even if it wraps our lips around our face with its ferocity. Why? Because staying static spells disaster amidst a world re-writing its own rules every day.
I’ve found over the years, working with dozens of organizations, that the only thing that stands between us and our ambition is the grey matter between our ears. It’s a simple decision of attitude. Embrace change or don’t. Position for the future or don’t. Feel urgency to accomplish or don’t. Drive performance or don’t. This simple decision needs to be a corporate one.
And the only thing that fuels the fire of ambition – or doesn’t – is the degree to which we choose to be ignorant to a simple fact: change is exponential. The change genie isn’t going back into the bottle. We can expect it to upset the apple cart of everything we know about the world. And the most successful will be those that embrace it and aren’t fearful of making mistakes and learning along the way. After all, importance lies in the energy in the journey. We can’t possibly know the destination these days.
To navigate the future successfully, we will need all the tigers we can get.
To all the Tiggers of bouncy trouncy exuberance for non-conformist change out there, keep the head high. Stay strong in your belief that you are a difference maker. Tigers are an endangered species. We have way too many mice.
To all the organizations, municipalities and corporate cultures that are celebratory of tradition, beware. Predictability is our Achilles heel.
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