Life is full of examples that teach us lessons. That’s why stories and illustrations make learning so much more effective. When a story can be used to illustrate or demonstrate a valuable lesson, the story makes it much more understandable, relatable, and memorable. With that in mind, I want to take some time to do just that – share examples of circumstances and stories experienced in everyday life which illustrate leadership lessons that we can learn and apply. This is one of those examples, and it teaches us that doing the same thing doesn’t always guarantee the same result.
This lesson became obvious to me recently when I grew out my beard. It wasn’t the first time I had grown the hair on my face. I had grown facial hair in different forms at different times since I was 18 years old, including a mustache, a goatee, and various lengths of beard. But for the last 10 years, I had been clean-shaven. So, when I started growing a beard again, I expected it to look like it had before. It didn’t take long, however, before it became obvious that this time it would be different. This time . . . it was white. Not gray. Not salt-and-pepper white mixed with my hair color. It was completely white. The beard was the same, but the color was not.
It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. You’ve probably seen this happen, and likely are guilty of it yourself. You did certain things or exhibited certain behaviors, and the result was a mess. But then, for some reason, you did the same thing again, and the result was the same mess. And it makes sense that this happens because the same actions tend to lead to the same results. But my beard was evidence that this is not always the case.
Sometimes doing the same thing does not guarantee the same result. That’s because life brings changes and differences. As time passes, there are lots of different factors that can shift or change, leading to a different outcome. It reminds me of the original Jurassic Park movie, where Jeff Goldblum‘s character is describing chaos theory by dropping a little drop of water on top of his knuckle, and explaining how tiny variations can change the outcome in unexpected ways. Similarly, that was the case with my beard. My face is the same, and the hair that grows on my face still grows the same way, but time and age caused the color to change. So even though I grew the same beard that I’ve grown in the past, it was not the same! It made me realize that differences in age, time, circumstances, and contexts can produce different results.
I experienced this in my leadership practice when I left a school where I had served for nearly 10 years as a teacher, guidance counselor, and assistant principal, to go to a new school in another state as the Head of School. I had, what were in my mind, brilliant ideas based on some things that had been a huge success in the school that I came from. But when I tried to implement them in the new school, I was met with resistance, and a definite lack of enthusiasm. I tried to do the same things, but in a different context, and I got a different result. I learned in that experience that the same thing doesn’t work the same way everywhere, and that I needed to do different things based on where I was.
That’s the lesson on leadership from this little thing in life, from growing my beard but finding that it was a different color. Doing the same thing doesn’t always lead to the same results. You need to be aware of the differences that can affect what the outcome might be, learn to take those into consideration, and adjust your actions based on the context and circumstances. While it is true that sometimes doing the same thing and expecting a different result is insanity, at other times it’s insanity to expect the same result. Because doing the same thing is not a guarantee of the same result.
