One of my favorite places to visit is Rome, particularly ancient Rome. I’m a sucker for ancient monuments and ruins. I love the stories they tell. I marvel at the inventions of ancient people. Now, when we think of Roman innovations, our minds often drift to aqueducts, durable concrete, or remarkable bridges. Let’s take a moment to appreciate a less obvious marvel—cruise control. Stick with me here before you change the channel.

Consider the famous Appian Way, the Roman highway stretching from Rome to Brindisi—a 400-mile journey. Portions of this road, preserved over centuries, reveal the wear of countless chariots. Years of traffic carved grooves into the stone, allowing charioteers to navigate effortlessly along the path. Imagine the luxury of relaxing as their wheels followed these grooves toward their destination.

Humans love automation, where they don’t have to think so much and can follow the pattern--getting into the groove with the least amount of resistance and effort. Sadly, we sometimes get so fixated on these patterns that we are afraid to wander off the beaten path and take a chance on a new opportunity.

One of the things I work on with high performers is discerning when to disrupt a pattern that leads to mediocrity or ‘good enough’ work and when to embrace a pattern because its efficiency allows for focus and effort to be placed on more impactful outcomes.

Here's an example from my experience of when challenging a policy led to breakthroughs:

When I was a new athletic director, students had not been allowed into the gym to practice on their own because of risk. Heaven forbid! What if a student falls or rolls their ankle?  It was predicted to surely end in a law suit. You’ll find that lots of patterns persist because of two key enablers: fear of risk and fear of budget impact. Patterns are usually put in place to reduce one of these mitigating factors. When risk and budget lead the conversation, innovation is stopped dead in its tracks. Risk and budget are like giant boulders blocking change in many organizations. It’s hard to move them. 

When brainstorming can happen first, and a leader can champion the best idea to be piloted, great things can happen.

When I tackled the pattern of not allowing students in the gym without supervision, our athletes could relentlessly train their individual skills. Our teams started to get better. Our win/loss record improved. We started to get some national attention. When Wake Forest, Wisconsin and Duke came to play us, we started to see an increase in the number of admissions applications, website hits, donations and a rise in our overall academic reputation as an institution. Disrupting the pattern led to benefits we couldn’t even begin to imagine that far exceeded the risk of the initial resistance.

Let me illustrate this with a business example:

In the early 2000s, Netflix disrupted the consumer pattern of renting DVDs from brick-and-mortar stores by introducing a subscription-based service. Remember going to Blockbuster on a Friday night? Netflix took away the hassle of waiting for the most popular releases and sent them directly to our homes. They soon garnered the market. They didn't stop there. Netflix further disrupted its own model by transitioning into online streaming, and more recently to producing its own content. Netflix has flourished by not respecting established norms but taking risks that embrace emerging technology and looking for opportunities.

Hear me clearly, the goal is not to disrupt patterns for the sake of making our mark as a leader. As high performers, we need to recognize that even the best policies and processes are created in an environment that is never stagnant. The environment sometimes changes so slowly that we don’t notice the incremental shifts. It’s not until our competition innovates that we feel suddenly on the brink of being obsolete.

Whether in our personal or professional lives, we must periodically reassess our routines and question the validity of the efficiencies and patterns around us. I encourage you to take a look at whether your grooves are still leading you on the right path. It's likely there is one worth experimenting with.

Consider blazing a new trail!