The way we remember things is amazing. We don’t remember things as if we’re watching a movie, a chronological order of events with time in equal units. Brilliant extraordinary things often stick out, like a special birthday celebration. In the same way awful extraordinary things can also take a dominant position in how we remember different chapters of our lives. The ordinary routine things on the other hand, they can blur and we can even forget they’ve happened at all. We can often find ourselves at the office but not totally remembering getting there if it’s a journey we do day after day, month after month, year after year.
2020-2022 was an incredible illustration of this. The extraordinary events of those two years were experienced by billions of us (albeit in different ways). There is a shared experience of that particular block of time. It was a time with many extraordinary events, the awful and the brilliant. Yet for many of us the four walls of the apartment were the same morning, noon and night, and our days merged into weeks and months of a lather rinse repeat cycle. Significant events (the good and the bad) couldn’t be marked in tangible ‘embodied’ ways, and many of us have emerged from that time with a feeling of discombobulation. That chapter of life could have been three years, three months, or thirty years.
As we’ve reflected on that time over the last couple of years, we’re seeing the importance of living with different ‘breaks in the pattern’, and how those breaks are actually critical to being able to grow and thrive.
What is breaking the pattern?
Breaking the pattern is about breaking into the passage of time. It can happen in different ways and at different scales. It can be the big breaks to the pattern like starting a new job, moving home, welcoming a new member of the family. It can also be the more regular breaks to the pattern on an annual cycle (like birthdays, anniversaries), or even weekly cycle (a day off in the week), daily cycles (marking the different sections of the day, often with meals or activities) or hourly cycles (taking breaks between tasks, moving between meetings etc.). Whatever the scale, breaking the pattern leads to opportunities to reflect, change and grow. Often when we break a pattern it allows us to encounter and experience different perspectives, it creates the space for reflection and for these different approaches and perspectives to percolate our thinking.
Why do we need to have breaks in the pattern?
If we don’t have these micro, mini, meso, and mega breaks in the patterns we can find ourselves to some extent in the discombobulated state that many of us experienced during lockdowns. Without the opportunities to encounter different ideas, approaches or types of task, we have less fuel for our imagination. It can lead to a degree of dormancy or stilted growth, it can lead to burn out and less resilience to unexpected events (the external breaks in the pattern that are beyond our control). It can result in our world feeling smaller.
In contrast, when we do have breaks in the pattern, it forces us to think, to problem solve, to figure out how to do things in a different context. It breaks us out of autopilot as we encounter and experience the unfamiliar, and it creates opportunities to un-learn, learn and re-learn. The breaks create space for new ideas as we encounter new stimuli, along with time to reflect, to focus or re-focus. Ultimately the breaks challenge our unsaid and subconscious assumptions that help us to be more open which in turn shapes our ideas, values and goals.
Why does breaking the pattern do this?
In many ways we embrace efficiency.We know that to achieve things we need to find ways of reducing obstacles, creating clear pathways that minimise resistance, and these are often approaches that can be repeated, standardised and become compatible in the wider system or context that we’re in. Essentially we live in a world that encourages us to reduce (and even avoid) friction, because friction creates challenges that need to be overcome. But what if friction is actually exactly what we need? Â
A decade ago, we visited Japan. It was the most incredible experience to be in such a different place, with different customs, a language that we had no foundations in, and different ways of doing the day to day. We were keen to visit the coast, and worked out (with help from friends) the trains we needed and the tickets. It was quite the journey, we nearly ended up on the wrong half of a train but were saved by the hand signals of a kind elderly gentleman who we were able to connect with through hand signals and a common love for a particular premier league football team. We got to a beautiful hotel, we were welcomed and looked after impeccably. One evening we decided that we’d love to have Japanese food which wasn’t served in the hotel. We asked our wonderful hosts where they would recommend and they had just the place. They gave us a map and we were on our way. Within 200m of the hotel we realised that the ‘map’ was not to scale, nor did it have everything on it. It was bewildering until we managed to find a landmark that seemed to be on the map. We realised with a bit of trial and error that some of the landmarks next to each other on the map were next to each other in real life, and others not so much. We got to where we thought we needed to get to, and we were in a little street lined with houses. There were no signs, no restaurants. There was a symbol on the map, and after a while we noticed a similar(ish) symbol in the corner of a window of one of the houses. We looked at each other, and had a moment of ‘ok, what’s the worst that can happen?’. We knocked on the window. What happened next we still remember like it was yesterday. We were welcomed into the front room of a family home with smiles, we were sat down, and with hand gestures and smiles we somehow conveyed that we’d love some dinner. We watched the father and grandfather expertly slice fish and create exquisite sushi, we laughed with the daughter who had a world atlas with a page for the UK and one for Japan and we gestured and laughed as we tried to communicate. We had the most beautiful evening. It was not just dinner, it was not easy, there was a lot of friction, but it surprised us and changed us.
Breaking the pattern is choosing to not always go with the flow, it’s intentionally saying ‘I’m going to do or try something different’.
How do we break the pattern?
Breaking the pattern can be the big things but it can also be the small things. We have begun to think about breaking the pattern at different scales, whether that is in a day, over the week, or over the year. It looks different for everyone, but the thing that breaks in the pattern have in common is friction. It’s like the champagne glass that has been crafted with microscale roughness to disrupt the bubbles, or the tectonic plates that cause earthquakes. We’re thinking about how we can design-in friction to the routines, whether that is creating space in a day to move between meetings (move to a different space, or build in a walk) or creating opportunities to find people or places where we find different perspectives. We never need an excuse to celebrate, but celebrating milestones like birthdays and anniversaries but also the other events that, if you take a moment to reflect, are significant in the week or the month, creates breaks in the day to day and creates friction. One way we do this regularly is on Friday night share our ‘win of the week’ - what was yours?
Summary
The chapter of 2020-2022 was a time with extraordinary breaks in the patterns at every scale. It changed working patterns, family relationships and community connectedness, it changed science (the way that scientists worked together and shared data was transformational). At the same time we missed the regular breaks in the pattern like celebrating birthdays, or marking grief and loss communally. As we look forward, let’s not lose the opportunities that friction creates. Find ways to break the pattern whether that is in the day to day or over the year, and watch out for the growth and change that will happen.
Little BIG idea
A little summary of this big idea using the 1000 most common words
When we do things that are a bit different to what we usually do it helps us to find out new things and grow.