Insanity: A negative Product of Compounding

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

—Rita Mae Brown, Novelist

We talked about the Law of Compounding in earlier blogs, and in those, we touched on both the positive and the negative. As a natural law, compounding applies to everything, good or bad, much like gravity. If you’re sitting in a tree and you want to drop an acorn on your friend’s head, gravity assists you. If you’re in that same tree and you accidentally lose your balance, gravity assists you there too, even though you probably would rather it didn’t.

The key is to be careful of what you place under its control.

That quote I included at the beginning about the definition of insanity is something I’m sure we’ve all heard from time to time, and it’s usually attributed to Einstein. However, it was actually coined by a novelist in the 80s, though the roots of the concept date back to at least the nineteenth century, if not earlier.

When we take an action and expect a result, then get a different result, it’s technically a failure – a failure to get the intended result. When we then take that same action again, hoping for the expected result again, and fail, we’re somehow surprised.

But why? Why would repeating the same action over and over expecting different results ever succeed?

I can’t answer that, but I can tell you that once you’ve repeated it, it becomes an irresistible compulsion to keep repeating it (the Law of Compounding), and the more you repeat it, the more you perpetuate the compounding of insanity. The more that path is reinforced in your brain, the harder it is to blaze a new one. That is partly because of the compounding of shame in believing the failure is personal (identity), instead of recognizing it as an opportunity to learn.

Compounding takes a repeated action and causes it to become more and more ingrained every time you do it until it’s very difficult to respond differently in a situation. This can be used positively and negatively, depending on the situation.

It’s positive when we’re working towards becoming exceptional at a task or activity, like martial arts, but becomes debilitating when we become exceptional at taking ownership of the failure and living defeated because of the shame that it reinforces. It’s like the quote by Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

When my dad died, I was put in a position to have to make a lot of very difficult decisions alone. I felt like I had to have the answer, I had to know which decision to make. The grief and hurt from that time in my life caused me to perpetuate that belief about myself. I believed that I was a great problem-solver and that I could make quick decisions on the fly with no input from anyone, but I was really just hiding my shame that I didn’t “know it all.”

I really did need people’s help, but I’d created a persona to keep others at arm’s length, to avoid letting anyone help me. Many times when we have shame, we’ll create an identity that is the opposite of that shame to combat that feeling, and that’s what happened to me. I had taken so much ownership of that, that it had become a projection.  

There is an Andy Andrews quote from his book, The Traveler’s Gift, that says, "God did not put in me the ability to always make right decisions. He did, however, put in me the ability to make a decision and then make it right." In the right context, that is a great quote. Unfortunately, I used it as an excuse to make reckless decisions alone, and not ask for help from trusted advisors.

That belief and that reckless behavior continued right up to the time I was fired. I had to make quick and correct decisions alone due to the death of my father, and instead of moving past that and doing things differently, I continued making decisions that way. Even when things went wrong, I kept on going, doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

When your organization is experiencing a lot of failure, and your turnover is high, and you know something needs to change, you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results. You have to make the decision to do it differently, and before you make the decision, you have to recognize that there’s something you’re doing repetitively that’s not getting the results that you want.

I’ve shared this story before, but it illustrates this well. My wife Lora runs a very successful salon. Unfortunately she was having an issue with her team members not following their daily checklists and it was really frustrating for her. She had formed a very well-thought-out process and created a checklist so that everyone could follow the process exactly, but no matter how many times she told them that it was important to follow it, participation was somewhere around 60 percent. She told them over and over what they needed to do, and despite taking the exact same action, she was expecting different results (team member participation to increase).

She and I talked it over and we realized that while she was telling them it was important, she didn’t explain WHY. So she shared with them that each process was designed to make sure that every client—from the first person who came in that morning to the last person who left—had the same extraordinary experience. Because her team members shared that purpose, once they understood that was the reason for the process, they haven’t missed one day of that checklist in eight months. Nothing was going to change for Lora and her team members until she changed her approach.

Nothing is going to change for you and your organization until you change your approach, otherwise you’re just practicing insanity.