Challenging the Typical
As I continued to recover from my MTB crash, I kept having new experiences which provided insights into what is not typical for me, but might be typical for others. I found a leadership lesson here as well which I will share.
My recovery included increasing my mobility. For the first 45 hours, I couldn’t walk without assistance from either my husband or a cane. Then I began to walk on my own but very slowly and loudly (as each step was painful). After 3 short walks outside with my husband, I made plans to walk to my first physiotherapy appointment alone.
According to Google Maps, the distance seemed manageable — it projected an 8 minute walk. I gave myself 20 minutes to cover this distance. It was 5 minutes into my walk when I realised this was probably a bad idea. Every step hurt and I was moving slower than a turtle. I was 10 minutes late for my appointment.
There is something worth noting which added to my delay — and that was the amount of time it took to cross an intersection. Under normal conditions, I could run across with just a few seconds remaining on a green walk light. However, I found that I had to wait for the walk signal to turn freshly green before I even began. Even then, I sometimes didn’t make it fully across before the walk light turned red.
It made me question the assumptions behind stop light cycle lengths. I did a quick Google search and came across the US Department of Transportation’s Traffic Signal Timing Manual. It included a chart on pedestrian walk interval durations based on “typical” pedestrians. The reference for “older pedestrians” was 3 feet per second. That day, I was moving at a speed of 3 feet in five seconds. That is a significant gap, don’t you think?
You could argue I shouldn’t have been walking at all under those conditions and that would be a fair point. But that adds to one’s costs if you need to hire someone to help drive you home. I could afford that but not everyone can.
As leaders, we are often drawn to those team members who absorb new information quickly and can keep up with us. Maybe we like to think of those team members as “typical”. We are often frustrated by those who need more time to absorb new information and are therefore “atypical”. But the benefits of letting each team member play to their strengths is advantageous to the team and to the organisation or company. It just takes a little more time to make better decisions.
So my question for you is this: what assumptions do you need to challenge right now in order to rethink what it means to be typical?
