Three Days to a Rut: Why Deliberate Variation Makes You a Better Leader
By David Norman, CMC®
Published on The Consultants Peer Group website | tcpgroup.net
There is an old idea, loosely attributed to the world of creative thinking, that goes something like this: "If you do the same thing three days in a row, you're in a rut." Three days. Not three months. Not three years. Three days.
That is how quickly routine hardens into autopilot. And autopilot is the enemy of leadership.
Here's what I've observed across more than five decades of consulting: when leaders stop varying how they think, who they talk to, and what questions they ask, they don't just get bored. They get blind. The same inputs produce the same outputs, and organizations quietly drift toward the comfortable and familiar. Growth rarely lives there.
Here's the part that surprises most leaders. Breaking out of the rut doesn't just make you more innovative. It reduces the stress of being "the one with all the answers."
When you ask a different question in a team meeting, you invite others to think. When you seek out a perspective you wouldn't normally hear, you distribute the load. When you stop running every decision through the same familiar process, you create space for collective wisdom to emerge. Research on team effectiveness consistently shows that leaders who shift from answer-giving to question-asking see higher engagement and better problem-solving from their teams.¹ You don't carry less responsibility. You carry it differently, and that difference matters.
The antidote to autopilot is not chaos. It is deliberate variation. Read something outside your industry. Take a different path through your day. Ask one person on your team what they see that you might be missing. These are small moves, but they signal something important to the people around you: that leadership is an active practice, not a fixed posture.
Ruts don't announce themselves. They form quietly, one repeated day at a time. The leaders who stay sharp are the ones who notice, and then deliberately do something different.
That choice, made consistently, is how good leaders become extraordinary ones.
¹Edmondson, A.C. (1999). "Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams." Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. See also Woolley, A.W., et al. (2010). "Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups." Science, 330(6004), 686-688.David Norman works with business leaders who are ready to build organizations capable of performing not just when conditions cooperate but especially when they do not. His books Supercharge: A New Playbook for Leadership and Accountability Shift: Tips, Traps, and Techniques are available now. Subscribe to this newsletter at davidtnorman.substack.com -- currently free for early subscribers.
