If you play the game, you inherit the rules.  What if there was another game?  

I have the privilege of talking to folks across a number of industries and organization types.  Part of the fun in talking with folks is exposure to the types of questions they ask.  Implicit in their questions are the assumptions they make. For example, when talking with a colleague in consulting services, she is going to be prepared with a version of how she can help and what the level of effort is going to be.  My nonprofit friends are always prepared with a need when asked.  My friends from the south ask what time the game is and it’s understood that we’re talking about the University of Georgia football game — all because those are the rules.  

I did some work with a bank that is highly regulated by a federal overlord, or at least by the threat of an overlord.  I realized pretty quickly that no one I worked with had actually met this person or persons.  It hadn’t occurred to me that behind ‘the Fed’ is a person trying to do a job and no one in the building had ever met him/her/them/it.  After spending some time there, it became clear that the threat of the overlord ruled every meeting.  And yet…. This had gone on so long that people were unclear on the actual rules, the findings from an internal audit in 1997 and the threat being of chastised.  All of this running from the Ghost of Sarbanes-Oxley.  That’s the game they’re playing though: risk management and not becoming Enron.  You play the game of banking and you inherit the rules of compliance. 

While a smaller scale, I watch this with the kids.  If you want to play a game with a ball and a field, you inherit a certain set of rules.  Picking it up and passing  it is called basketball.  Using a stick and big gloves is lacrosse.  Otherwise, a ball that is kicked at a goal is soccer.  Anything else is a different game.  

What rules are we playing by?  What if there were a different set of rules?  

I’ve been in professional services for the entirety of my career.  The economics of this arrangement between me, the firm I work for and the client are pretty straightforward: effort (time) x rate (dollars) + risk (buffer).  The rest is simply arithmetic.  As long as I’m working for a services firm, this is the calculus.  

When I stepped away from a firm, the calculus changed.  I began to see the implicit assumptions I’d been making.  What if my market value was not in my hourly bill rate?  What if my compensation came outside another quarter point of 401k matching?  What if I didn’t have to put on a blue suit and cut my hair.  If this is true, what else is possible?  

I’m grateful to the outside perspective because it helps challenge my assumptions, because it’s in those assumptions that the constraints are self-implied.  

What are the rules that you’ve assumed that are informing your decisions?