Zombie Ideas and the Status Quo

If you are a fan of horror movies, you’ll know the trope about the danger being inside the house. In business, there are dangers that live “inside the house” and we aren’t very good at identifying them, much less defeating them.

Building the skills to help identify and eliminate the forces standing in the way of innovation can be the difference between success and stagnation for your business.

Inertia and the status quo

“That’s how we’ve always done it.” This is the catch phrase of the status quo, and even if it’s not said aloud, it’s frequently invoked when change is needed, or decisions are being made about go-forward strategies.

Any challenge to the current state involves asking questions about how things are done now. But people associate risk with these types of questions. Leaders may be worried about reputational risk (what if things get worse?) and employees worry about how it will impact their roles and their work.

We have a bias toward maintaining the status quo, the default bias, where the status quo is our baseline and any deviation from that is perceived as a loss or gain. But when there is no guaranteed outcome, we will focus on potential loss (loss aversion).

This kind of status quo/closed thinking is associated with groupthink, which can develop when a group of people (a team, a company) conform in their thinking to the point where they make poor decisions. Groups reach consensus without criticizing or challenging each other. In businesses with long-term employees, as we have, groupthink is more likely, and the group will favor the status quo.

Blocking innovation

Inertia and groupthink are blockers to innovation. As Timothy R. Clark puts it, “innovation requires deviation.” But if a company’s leaders and employees are digging in to protect their status quo, they are in danger of having a “willful blindness to growing irrelevance.”

Encouraging employees to develop new capabilities and providing programs and resources for them do so is a smart business decision. Let smart people seize the initiative instead of putting up implicit roadblocks that seek to protect the status quo. Of course, security and governance guardrails are necessary, but shouldn’t be used to shut down upskilling programs.

What about the zombies?

This danger in the house often comes from senior leaders and influencers within a company. There are signs and insights from customer observation indicating a change is needed, or a new opportunity. But before any productive discussion gets going, they effectively shut it down, saying, “We know our customers and they won’t want that,” or “We should put resources into [my] favorite idea from 2 years ago.”

These are zombie ideas. As Bill Fischer describes them, they are old ideas or beliefs that come back from the dead to capture/overtake an organization’s decision-making process. The term was coined by Paul Krugman, who suggested that there are ideas that never die and undermine leaders who rely upon them. Those leaders don’t realize that their outdated thinking can block any new choices an organization is considering.

Zombie ideas are familiar. They are comfortable. They seem to be the least risky option. Amy Edmondson says they exist wherever it’s difficult for employees to challenge the logic underlying leadership decisions. And because of the power dynamics, a leader’s zombie ideas can infect an entire organization.

You can see how zombie ideas are related to the assumptions and groupthink that lead to status quo biases. Companies can (and do) have zombie projects – projects that don’t fulfill their promised outcomes, but they continue to exist. They tie up resources with no real path to having a meaningful impact or generating revenue. More importantly, they will block a company’s innovation pipeline. Likely they have an impact on morale as well.

Employees may spot trends, changes, or threats early, and then wonder why leaders don’t. They know a zombie project is there, but don’t understand why leaders don’t intervene. In part, it’s because leaders got where they are on the merit of past decisions and actions, and they carry a belief that it will work again. However, customers change, business factors change, and industries change, and so will the risks and opportunities.

Worry when people are quiet or polite all the time

When changing the status quo feels like a threat, it becomes emotional and personal. People may protect themselves by essentially becoming non-responsive. They will stay quiet when challenging questions should be raised, and they will stay polite when difficult conversations need to happen. They worry about being perceived as a threat to those who have power over them or threatening existing structures and hierarchies.

Encouraging these employees to speak up is a good start to getting the zombies out of the house. The right questions against the status quo start with “What if?” Not only “What if we try this?” but especially, “What if we don’t do anything?” which seeks to expose the dangers lurking in your business if nothing changes. Some other great questions are:

1. Why did we start doing it this way? Are conditions the same now?
2. What assumptions are baked into doing it this way?
3. Who benefits from doing it this way? Who doesn’t? Taken one step further, if the answer is that you are doing things to make it easier for the business and not for customers, then that’s a real danger to long-term success of the business.
4. What are the outcomes we want to achieve? Can we achieve them in a different way?
5. Who haven’t we talked to about this? Looking for input outside of your usual group is a great way to counter groupthink.

Here are some steps to build skills to challenge the status quo:

1. Anticipate the opportunity. Most likely, there’s no specific time when challenges are requested, so you need to do so within the normal course of business. Oftentimes the opportunity may be a chance encounter with someone who can sponsor you. Have a sort of “pitch deck” ready with data and a reasoned way to start.
2. Prioritize ideas. People who are chronic dissenters start to alienate others because they seem to only be about dissent. The good questions/ideas get lost. It’s better to pick a few suggestions that are most relevant and that have the best chance of being implemented.
3. Know your audience. The personality, biases, preferences, and goals of key people will impact how challenge can happen in a healthy way. When might they welcome dissent, or at least be okay with it? Since people are often unsure if it’s okay to challenge, asking for explicit permission can be helpful: “May I ask a challenge question?” This changes the dynamics from confrontation to contribution.
4. Acknowledge and understand the past. Demonstrate that you understand the drivers of previous decisions and how things came to be as they are now. It’s a truism that people make the best decisions they can in the circumstances, but circumstances change and therefore strategy needs to change too. Be clear about the risks as well as the upsides. Try to be impartial, to see things from others’ perspectives, and to identify knock-on effects ahead of time.
5. Embrace curiosity. Curiosity is often far more successful than contradiction. And if you are a leader, inviting people to ask challenge questions is a great way to enhance curiosity in your team. Leaders should encourage dissent/curiosity in decision making.
6. Bring data. Data can de-personalize and de-risk challenging the status quo. Clark says quantitative data is the best, and I think it’s important, but qualitative and anecdotal data can also be valuable and sometimes more impactful/persuasive. Remember, the status quo often invokes emotional reactions when challenged, so storytelling can be very effective to counter that.
7. Bring friends. If the idea is truly of merit, you don’t need to own it. Plus, getting more people involved will add other perspectives and help to really work through assumptions.

Defining a healthy workplace on your own terms

Nimisha Patel suggests we could redefine what a healthy workplace is to include dissention and experimentation in a safe environment. What would that look like for your organization?

When it comes to zombie ideas, here are some ways to expose them and counteract from Bill Fischer (summarizing a recent Drucker panel):

1. Leadership literacy. As part of leader development, help them to build up their literacy of emerging and past leadership trends. This will provide them with a wider view and solid foundation to be more critical of management practices in place.
2. Designate some zombie killers. Organizations should create new “informal” roles to call-out the presence of zombie ideas.
3. Obligation to dissent. A healthy work culture will have an “obligation to dissent” so that people feel comfortable to ask, “why are we doing this?”
4. Protect dissenters. Dissenters should be protected, even when it turns out that they were mistaken about an idea they challenged. This is part of building teams with high psychological safety.
5. Diversity and shared stewardship. The difference between project ownership and project stewardship is that you can avoid the notion that any one person, or group, owns (i.e., controls) important projects. Diverse workgroups with a broader sense of ownership counters groupthink and the different perspectives will help to expose zombie ideas.