In this paradigm-shifting episode, Scott Ritzheimer shares why rejecting “foolish consistency” unlocks founder greatness across all stages. If you struggle with rigid processes killing innovation or chasing shiny objects derailing vision, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– How continuity of vision beats rigid methods every time
– Why foolish consistency is the hobgoblin stifling your breakthroughs
– What adaptive leadership separates great founders from the pack
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start scale and succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder, and today, we’ve got another solo episode for you on something that I think is a very interesting topic. I want to open up with one of my favorite quotes from the one and only. Ralph Waldo Emerson, this comes from self reliance, and I want to read it off to you. He says, A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow, speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. Ah, so you shall be misunderstood. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood Socrates and Jesus and Luther and Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh to be great is to be misunderstood. I love this quote. It’s it’s one that just always kind of lingers in the back of my mind, and I think it’s one that describes founders and what founders do so well, founders see through that foolish consistency. They believe, from the very get go that there must be a better way. Founders help organizations avoid what we call a stage called treadmill for organizations, where form starts to edge out function. FaceTime is more important than getting things done.
Checklists become more important than whatever they were there for in the first place. As a As humans, we kind of worship consistency. The World conspires toward it, and I believe that one of the biggest gifts that founders bring to the world is the opportunity to break from that consistency. But, but Emerson’s quote doesn’t say consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, little minds. He says a foolish consistency. And one of the things that’s really struck me, just to peel back the curtain a little bit on my world as I’ve been writing the full length version of the founder, the founders evolution book, which I hope will be coming out next year. One of the things that has been a huge challenge has been to maintain continuity from chapter to chapter. And I want to kind of unpack the difference between those two here in this episode, the difference between consistency what you have succeeded by destroying time and time again by thing, by saying hard words today and then saying what tomorrow thinks, even though it contradict everything you said today, that that railing against foolish consistency that has been such a big part of Your success as a founder must be harnessed by continuity. You see, especially once we get into stages three and four and five, and we start getting bigger and bigger enterprises around us, more and more people that we depend on and that depend on us.
If you embrace that lack of consistency, that that desire for inconsistency that many of us founders have. I was talking with a client the other day. He’s like, I drive to work a different way every time, because I need the variety of my life. It’s such a founder thing to say, but we have to recognize the value of continuity. And I would say that if you understand continuity, you can maintain the inconsistency that you need to thrive and do your best work as a visionary, as a founder, while also providing your team with the momentum that they need to move forward. So here’s the difference, consistency is doing the same thing, especially a foolish consistency is doing the same thing because you did it before. And we all face this right? There’s this pressure to do it the same way, not only because of the natural inertia and momentum that it has, but because to do it a different way would be to admit that we were wrong, or at least it feels that way. And so we all face this pressure Now, earlier in your stages, there’s a lot less pressure to do this, because let’s face it, you didn’t make all the decisions that you’re challenging. You didn’t design the industry the way that it is now. You didn’t create the status quo. But those tables turn when we get into these later stages, in stage four and in stage five, and dare I say, into stages six and seven, that consistency is not consistency derived from what others did. It’s consistency derived from what you did, and you now have a vested interest in protecting that consistency, because you’re the one who made so many of those decisions. And if we’re not careful, we can succumb to the little mindedness that Emerson’s talking about.
Here. So consistency, again, is doing things a certain way simply because we did them that way beforehand. It what happens when we overvalue consistency is we stop asking the question, why we we stop? We stop even we How do I say we stop even recognizing that we are making assumptions about the constraints on our business or our time and what we do, and we’re not willing to challenge those assumed constraints because we don’t even know that they exist anymore. And so founders do a really great job at this just by virtue of who they are and the way that they think I know for me I can’t be consistent. It’s just I wish I could. There would be so many ways that it would serve me so well in life, but it is so hard for me to be consistent at the same time, I do fight for continuity, and particularly in a team environment, what continuity is, is a recognition of what you’re doing, right?
It’s a deep, probing insight into the things that are working, not just that they are working, but why they are working, and a recognition that inconsistency, for inconsistency’s sake, is actually foolish consistency. If you believe that you need to be inconsistent just because you’ve been inconsistent before, that’s the same problem that Emerson is tackling in this quote. And so continuity is the recognition that, hey, we have got some things right. There are some things that are working. You’ll hear the saying you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sure, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time, but sometimes you are. And continuity, I believe, is the skill of knowing when to reinvent the wheel and when to make it better. And so what we want to think about in terms of continuity is, hey, how can I not just do the things that we’ve done in the past, but how can I build on the success that we’ve had in the past? How can we take what’s already working and make it better? How can we leverage the success we’ve had not to protect it, not to kind of circle the wagons around it, but to actually use the the capital there, in all its different forms, the human capital, the financial capital, the relational capital, the intellectual capital. How do we take all of these things that we have figured out? How do we take all the success that we had, and how do we actually put it to work to move us forward? How do we use our success to challenge the very basis of our success? And when you do that on a continuous basis, when you are constantly taking a critical look at why it is you do, what you do, what it is you’re doing that’s working and what isn’t working, what used to work and what will no longer work, you’re able to achieve a high degree of continuity. Now, the benefit of that is, let me talk about the flip side.
If you don’t do that, what happens is, I forget who it was. I think it might be. Wickman described this as organizational whiplash, but wow, I see this all the time. You’re driving in a direction, you’re taking your whole team with you, and then all of a sudden, you just yank the wheel because you see something shiny over to the right, and then as soon as you’re about to get there, you yank the wheel to the other direction, because you see something shiny to the left. And when you’re in the driver’s seat, I mean, just imagine, like if you’re in a car and someone’s doing that, if you’re the one doing it, you can anticipate it. You can lean into the turn. You are holding the wheel and you are putting your feet on the gas or brakes. You’re in control. You can tolerate a far greater degree of chaos when you’re in control than when you’re in the passenger seat. And there’s only one person who can have the wheel on your organization, which means that you have to think about what’s happening for your passengers as well. And so imagine being in the passenger seat, so yanking the wheel back and forth, it’s not a pleasant experience, and you’re not going to do your best work in that environment, and your team won’t do your team won’t do their best work in that environment either.
Scott Ritzheimer
Now, just to throw a bone to those of you out there, yeah, there are times when you do need to yank the wheel. The whole foolish consistency thing doesn’t mean you always keep driving in the same direction, sometimes as the visionary, sometimes as the founder, sometimes as a CEO, it’s your job to make the really uncomfortable decision to yank the wheel, because you see trouble coming. And so there are times and occasions when yanking the wheel is necessary, but it’s not all the time, and it’s not in all occasions. So how do we know the difference? Well, we know the difference through continuity. We know the difference by again, looking at not just what works, but why it works, and how we can build on that, and what happens when you can maintain some continuity. And you’ll see this. This is actually why vision, mission and values work so well. This is why big, long term, 510, 1550, year goals, why they’re so. Effective is because they don’t demand consistency, right?
That’s so far away that if we do something today and we do it different tomorrow, it doesn’t matter at all. Those big, long term goals don’t demand consistency, but they do demand continuity. And so here’s my advice. I share this with the founders I work with all the time, especially stages four and five. And that is your job as the founder, your job as the CEO, your job as that visionary leader is to paint an ever clearer picture of a more beneficial horizon it. And that’s that’s continuity, right there, right? It’s not consistency, right? We’re not talking about taking every step the exact same way to get there, but we are talking about a continuity of direction, a continuous destination that’s out in the horizon waiting for us and continuing to lead people there. So I want you to think about this as you’re listening today, as you’re going about your day. How good are you at fighting against that foolish consistency that has become the hobgoblin of little minds.
Where has that helped you in the past? How have you succeeded because of your ability to push against the grain and go against the common wisdom in your space? And where is that causing you problems today, where has a desire for the desire to push against consistency actually caused you to unintentionally sacrifice continuity for you and your team. Where are you pulling your team away from your long term goals to chase some shiny object as a pull, as opposed to pulling them through the uncertainty toward those long term goals that you have for your team, Food for Thought for today. I hope this episode was helpful for you. These are a blast. I really enjoy getting to share with you guys directly. If episodes like this are helpful, please let us know. We’d love your feedback on it. If you have any questions, if there’s anything we can do to help you, we’d be glad. You, we’d be glad to do that as well as you know your time and attention mean the world to us. So I hope you got your time’s worth out of this conversation, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Scott Ritzheimer
Scott helped start nearly 20,000 new businesses and nonprofits and with his business partner started led their multimillion-dollar business through an exceptional and extended growth phase (over 10 years of double-digit growth) all before he turned 35.He founded Scale Architects to help founders and CEOs identify and implement the one essential strategy they need right now to get them on the fast track to Predictable Success.
Want to learn more about Scott Ritzheimer’s work at Scale Architects? Check out his website at https://www.scalearchitects.com/