I don’t know about you, but for most of us there are times when business just gets stuck.

Our time-tested, reasonable patterns of creating products and getting new customers produce fewer and fewer results. I don’t know why – it’s not possible to say how this happens, except that in a complex environment – just like a computer operating system – the combined effects of other players’ actions can cause your own efforts to get all garbled and twisted.

A year before, your latest marketing launch might have made a big splash, but now – maybe because of new competitors with bigger marketing budgets than yours, you’ve made barely a ripple and all your reasonable efforts seem wasted.

So you go back to your playbook; your well-worn collection of tactics and strategies that has always earned money in the past – new products, flashy launches, maybe even a celebrity endorsement or industry guru saying good things about you – but nothing seems to work.

And worse, you still don’t know why.

It isn’t just the new competitors have more money, but they seem to be reaching the market in ways you don’t understand. What’s happening here?

Relax, and take a deep breath, because nothing you know how to do is going to work, and following your standard playbook is like pouring money down the drain.

It’s time to hit the three-fingered reset key:

Control-Alt-Delete.

That’s what it’s like when you decide your old rules – even though they still apply – aren’t getting what you want. All the reasonable actions that have worked in the past are having no effect.

Control-Alt-Delete.
Clearing your mind, wiping the slate clean, writing on a new sheet of paper. Decidedly NOT building on whatever your storehouse of good ideas holds.

The bad news, the really bad news, is that hitting the reset key and choosing to be unreasonable won’t cause your competitors to go away. But it will give you the opportunity to shrug off your old habit-patterns of thought.

Hitting the reset key can be a way to achieve a new level of thinking. Instead of asking a question based on what you know has worked in the past, you start asking about what – in the realm of possibility – what might work now.

As long as you are consumed by being reasonable, you will always cycle back to the same limited sets of options. By being unreasonable you are no longer held down by your previous success, and you are free to move into the future.

Why do most cars use the same inefficient engines and fossil fuels? Why are we stuck with sub-standard television options? Why do most cell phone data systems work as poorly as they do, given that some countries have achieved speeds twenty-times as fast?

It’s because all the players – producers, consumers, regulators, investors – have agreed to play by an agreed upon set of rules, and are all locked, quite reasonably, in a system which requires major, massive investment – and no one is willing to take the economic risk of breaking them because doing so could be fatal.

Does the same hold true in your business? Are you bound by a real set of constraints that limit your ability to address new opportunities.

In most businesses this simply is not true. The rules are not rules, nobody has bothered to prove these ideas to make sure they should be hard and fast. They are simply accumulations of past history. They are not legitimate market constraints; they are just the way you (and they) have always done things.

Let’s face it: Hitting the reset key is not going to be the solution to everyone’s problems – but it could be the solution to your own!

Will you break rules of your own past behavior, or perhaps – even more boldly – will you break rules set down by decades of industry and even, cultural, norms?

Tell me what you think and post your comments right here.