A rabbit’s owners wanted it to help them.
So they convinced the rabbit to copy how they buy food from the local supermarket.
It did well.
It could put items in the trolley, go to the checkout, pay, and even carry them home.
Sadly the rabbit wasn’t much help to it’s owners.
The problem was that the rabbit only bought lettuce and carrots.
You can imitate what someone does, but imitating how they think is another matter.
Innovation & driving change are common leadership challenges.
There’s a dilemma when imitation is your primary means of driving change.
It’s also the problem with “best practice sharing”.
Imitation is easy, but also a passive activity.
The goal is to copy what someone else already created.
We do what we’re told.
Success is defined by conformity to the original, not achieving a target.
We don’t learn from mistakes, we learn to be precise.
Imitation closes down creative thinking.
We can only imitate what we can see.
Worse – we often only imitate something we already know something about.
Henry Ford once said that if he had asked what his customers wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Unfortunately some leaders are no more creative with their own issues than Ford’s customers were about horses.
The Leader’s challenge is to find what you don’t know.
To get to places you haven’t been.
This is another game that leaders have to play.
It’s the struggle between our instinct to imitate others, and the desire to explore.
The struggle between Imitation and Exploration.
Good leaders preference exploration over imitation.
Imitation is a natural instinct.
It’s how young children learn language and most things we learn in our first few years.
Adults learn by exploring.
Good leaders avoid just imitating what went before, and they’re also skeptical of simply copying “best practices” of others.
They’re selective.
That is they’re happy to imitate the bits that will help them to achieve their objectives and leave the other bits.
Imitation, when it happens, is an outcome of Exploration, not a substitute for it.
“…Good leaders preference exploration over imitation.…”
Are you open to new ideas?
Do you follow what someone else has done, or adopt bits of what they’ve done where they’re useful.
Have you been inspired to change anything by seeing or hearing things totally unrelated to the problem you’re trying to solve?
Do you actively seek input or ideas from sources way outside your business or professional area?
Do you selectively copy ideas that you can see will help you achieve an objective?
Do you play the game of exploration or wait for ideas to come to you?
Do you prefer to copy things, or create things that others want to copy?
Are you an Imitator or an Explorer?
.
.
“I might be wrong, but at least I’ve thought about it…”
Great article!