A weekend is coming up. You will likely do the same things you always do on a weekend. Sleep in a little later? Fix a few things around the home? Spend time with the children?
What would happen if you posed this question to yourself or your partner, spouse or family: “Let’s design the best weekend of our lives – what will we do?”
As soon as the question is asked the brain starts thinking of possibilities. What eventually comes out from the conversation, I promise that the upcoming weekend will be different!
In business in the early days of Amazon, Bezos challenged his team to develop a way to offer free two-day shipping for Prime members. Many believed it was financially unfeasible. Despite skepticism, the team worked tirelessly to optimize logistics and distribution processes, ultimately making two-day shipping a reality and driving significant growth for the company.
Steve Jobs challenged his teams to reduce the size of the board for Macs substantially. It seemed impossible but the teams achieved it and changed the course of computer history.
Elon Musk is quite famous for pushing others to achieve great things. The Falcon rocket he demanded was to be cheaper and better and to return for reuse some of the main components – like the engines and fuel tanks. His people did it. Would it have happened without the unreasonable request?
An unreasonable request, asked by the leader, is a vision of what is possible .
What does unreasonable mean?
Trucks frequently have governors built into them. A governor is not a politician in this case, it is a piece of equipment that controls the maximum speed that a truck can be driven. Let’s say 100kph. As soon as that speed is reached, no matter how hard a driver presses the accelerator, the truck will not exceed that speed.
We possess governors inside us which warn us as soon as we are about to be unreasonable. For example, over lunch I ask if you will lend me 50 pesos. You will likely say yes. What if I asked you to lend me 1000 pesos – you might still say yes but ask when you will get it back. What about 30,000 pesos. You can almost hear the governor kicking in. Somewhere between 50 and 30,000 is reasonable. At some point the request is unreasonable.
Unreasonableness is an emotion that we feel and act on that ensures that we are operating in a way that others see as reasonable and so think well of us.
The Magic in being unreasonable.
Exceeding our reasonable governor threshold, by its very nature, is uncomfortable, a little scary and maybe risky. Especially if you are a manager making an unreasonable request.
But the value of unreasonable requests are seen in computers on which I am typing, the cost of buying on Amazon, the cost of exploring space and providing wifi to remote parts of the world through small satellites.
Managers who make unreasonable requests accept, going in, that they might not be fully achieved. But they believe in the possibility and support the employees as they battle to make the request a reality.
To make an unreasonable request you need two conditions to be met:
- You might not know how it is to be done but you have a deep sense that it is possible.
- You are willing to support your employees as they fail and succeed and, again, fail and succeed as they work to honour the request.
There is a downside to unreasonableness – you might be tempted to use it as a manipulating tool. The principle is not to be unreasonable in requests for unreasonable’s sake, but to make unreasonable requests that you sincerely believe are possible to be met, though how might be unknown.
Imagining Uber.
I can imagine the founders of Uber brainstorming one day. “What if every car owner was also a taxi?”. “What if we had an app that allowed passengers to connect direct with car owners and be picked up and dropped off just like a taxi?. “What if we, through the app, got a share of every ride contracted? And we would not have to own a single vehicle!”
Totally unreasonable thoughts – but not to the inventors. They saw it as possible and now all over the world, whether Uber or Grab cars, it is real.
Airbnb must have followed the same unreasonable thinking. Only in this case every home becomes a hotel.
The iPhone
When mobiles first came out they could only make telephone calls. Later they could send messages. But Jobs asked what if….you could phone, send messages, have thousands of songs on the phone and link to the internet? The iPhone was born by making these unreasonable dreams.
Your company
You can use unreasonableness in two ways:
- Imagining what would happen if the carefully planned results were doubled in the same time frame or achieved in half the time.
- Inventing ‘what if’ scenarios that break the governor barrier and create whole new businesses or results.
As a manager you can look at your domain and wonder how it might be transformed . Having seen a possibility this will lead to needing some unreasonable results – and away you go.
People love a challenge provided that the risk of failure is not too great. Currently, missing a KPI is seen as career-limiting. What if KPIs become the baseline results and the unreasonable targets become the ones that are the motivators that will exceed KPIs on a regular basis? 100% customer satisfaction is the unreasonable result seen as possible, whereas 90% customer satisfaction is the KPI for performance reviews.
In daily work unreasonable requests have the possibility of accelerating results, blowing through planned results and transforming the way work occurs.
In a workshop I ran which included unreasonable requests I would challenge the participants to make an unreasonable (according to their governor) request of some person that evening. They were to report on the results the next morning. The report-backs were, as the saying goes, the proof is in eating the pudding. From asking a wife for a massage to asking a child to put away their phone and play scrabble with their mother, the seemingly unreasonable requests became, in retrospect, reasonable.
In your daily work unreasonable might be time – do faster, quality – do better, cheaper – save money, new way – innovate, be flexible – open mind to possibility.
Try it today for yourself and see what happens.
