Oct

9

Leadership and Muscle Memory

Filed Under Uncategorized 

Friends,

It was deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. We were shooting hoops in the sidedrive. My “little” girls were now — it seemed all of a sudden — blocking my shots. One said, “let’s play lightning,” a fast-moving game we used to love but hadn’t played in a year. As we walked to the free throw line, an argument nearly broke out about which two basketballs we should use. I laughed out loud and asked them, “Do you guys remember I wrote about this very situation in an RFL years ago — about arguing about which balls we would use?” They remembered. We skipped the argument and played.

But, I was so struck by the thought: How uncanny that groups repeat, over and over, their same old patterns.

Athletes talk about a thing called “muscle memory.” It applies to much more than sports. The body memorizes patterns. The tongue and lips and vocal chords learn in the early years how to move and coordinate themselves to form words like “park” (or “pock” if that mouth is trained in Boston). The muscle movements — whether for speech, writing, or a thousand other activities become unconscious. These patterns can be changed with heightened conscious effort and repetition, but without such effort we will speak, swing a golf club, open a car door, stir our coffee, or write RFL with unquestioned repetitive patterns.

My experience with my girls suggested: just as with an individual, this pair of girls is repeating a “collective muscle memory.” It makes sense that groups would have such patterns of movement. For example, with muscle memory a manager frowns to show her frustration, and then her staff person with unconscious muscle memory, triggered by challenge, immediately begins to explain why he did what he did. The two people act like one organism. The unconscious repetitive responses are necessary, because they free our conscious minds from a million decisions. But we can see the danger. Repetition. Calcification. Misunderstanding. Reacting to the present as though it’s exactly the same as the past. It almost never is.

Leaders have to question the same old same old, the muscle memory, the deja vu all over again. Cuz stuff keeps changing. Like the kids who keep developing, the students who are different than last year’s, the customer, the competition, the board, the community, the parents, the spouse. Leaders watch. Leaders choose reality and ask whether the muscle memory is still functional. Leaders keep noticing what’s different and encouraging their teams, followers, kids, colleagues to see what’s really here right now, and whether yesterday’s solutions really work.

I am planning an upcoming conference, and the staff person sent me last year’s agenda, so we could “just tweak it.” I don’t think you can just keep tweaking last year’s agenda in this fast-changing world. Not if you’re going to…

Lead with your best self,

Dan

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