Boundaries are vital in life, because they are there to protect you. In a work environment especially, boundaries are there to protect your reputation and allow you to succeed. When you go outside the boundary, you’re learning what not to do.
Something most of us don’t realize is that there’s only one boundary, and you’re either above it or below it. We tend to think of boundaries as two things, because we compare it to a street—one side falls short of minimum standards (fail) and the other side meets minimum standards (pass), and means you’re working towards excellence.
We call this duality “pass/fail,” but a colleague of mine illustrates the fact that it’s actually one line, by telling his team that it’s “pass or no pass” rather than “pass or fail.” When you fall below that line of minimum standards, you simply try again until you rise above. That boundary isn’t stationary, though. Over time as we get better at what we do, we move the bar higher, increasing our minimum standards.
When our normal is to deviate from the standard, then that standard will go the other way; instead of being a pursuit of excellence, it’s a continual decline due to the normalization of deviance. In organizations, normalizing deviance puts us on a compounding path to lowering the bar.
Look at that versus adherence, and removing the ability to normalize deviance. Because you and your team know your "why," and know that those boundaries are there to protect your reputations, there’s no draw to normalizing deviance, and that is actually a compounding effect of pursuing excellence.
When there is a failure, you recognize there’s something bad in your process that needs to be improved. Then you get better and better and better. The longer the original minimum is there, the higher it moves and failure becomes less frequent.
Of course, failure (falling below the boundary line) is expected when someone is learning something new, that’s part of the transformation. When we’re guiding people to enable them, there are days where they’ll experience a "no pass." It’s not a true failure when we understand that we’re in the pursuit of excellence—not perfection.
To avoid the normalization of deviance, you have to measure everything, every day. There are certain things we do that are important, and that’s why we build processes. All processes are designed to defend and protect the reputations of our team members, creating trust. The process itself is the boundary, and we pass or don’t pass living within that boundary or expectation.
Once you grow past the minimum expectations, everything beyond that is purely the pursuit of excellence—though we’ll never be perfect. The pursuit of excellence is the law of insanity (repeating something over and over expecting different results) in reverse. You grow and improve every single day, doing something better and better; you’re understanding the minimum expectations and working the process to the place where you see continuous improvement.
Think about the dashed line in the middle of the road. That’s a boundary, right? It’s there to make sure you don’t hit oncoming traffic. You are allowed to cross it though, under certain circumstances. The double line in the middle of the road, however, is an even stronger boundary. You aren’t allowed to cross that one at all. If you do, you risk getting a ticket, or getting into an accident.
The consequences of deviating from that boundary can be death: the death of yourself, or the death of others. If you cross that boundary and cause a wreck that ends with fatalities, you not only get a ticket (or jail time), you’ve permanently impacted everyone who loved and relied on those people, and your reputation will never be the same. Boundaries of all kinds are just like that line, they’re there for your protection.
What does it take to build a team that can raise the bar in the continuous pursuit of excellence? That’s what we’ll talk about next.
Comments