You often hear or see a phrase that goes something like this, “Well that would require common sense”, which will get the rebuttal, “well common sense isn’t so common, especially these days”. The insinuation here is that people were smarter in the past or perhaps the youth are not as wise as their older peers. Often there is some underlying generational prejudice, if it is on social media, often not so subtle a feeling that get blasted onto the comments section that sparks an intergenerational flame war of Boomers Vs Millennials with Gen X in the middle casually watching, occasionally stoking the fire. “Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen”, as quoted by Einstein, or perhaps not, like most things on the internet there is some debate about whether this is verbatim or simply the believed views attributed to him by Lincoln Barnett. Either way it is a great quote if not entirely accurate. Common sense to me is understanding that one should not cross the road without looking, or that it is a bad idea to exit a building from the seventieth floor. Most people can agree these are bad ideas if you are at all interested in your continued existence. In eastern philosophy, there is something called Karma, in the west we understand that to be, whatever you do to others you will receive back in kind, or more simply, “do bad, get bad”, “do good, get good”. The real meaning as I understand it has been lost in translation and karma is more about wisdom, for example, “The lazy zebra lays in the path of a hungry lion”. What does this mean though? Perhaps a better modern analogy would be, “If you don’t put on your seat belt and you crash, you’ll go through the windscreen regardless of who caused the crash”. In the west we look to blame someone externally rather than to look within, “they crashed into me and now I am injured and it’s their fault!”, rather than to reflect and think that maybe they should have taken those few seconds to buckle up. Karma or wisdom is the ability of an individual to project themselves into the future, analyse the various possible outcomes and decide what they believe is the correct course of action. Common sense in business is much the same and can be a great tool, for example, someone comes to you with an idea that they are very enthusiastic about, however with your years of experience and wide breadth of knowledge, you can say with almost certainty that it will fail or advise them to proceed but to watch for obvious pitfalls. Perhaps it’s not such a great idea to invest the pension fund in beanie babies just yet? Why then did I start this piece with the premise that perhaps common sense is not a force for good having spent the last few paragraphs explaining why it is and can be a useful tool? Because of this phrase, “but we’ve always done it this way”. Sometimes those young upstarts with apparently no common sense are exactly what your company needs to ask questions and to break company norms. Since I sadly can no longer claim to be a young upstart, I will take an incident from early in my career of a trivial yet amusing example. I went to my first day on a crew for a national TV show, the rehearsal went well apart from one mistake I made, and I was corrected by the director. Thankfully, I got it right the next time around and then we went for lunch. At lunch I walked in grabbed some pizza to the shock of everyone around me, I didn’t know what I had done but I had clearly made a social faux par. What had I done? There was a queue I had somehow completely missed. l was so fixated on the pizza that I had not even acknowledged the presence of other people in the room. I was in no uncertain terms and rather aggressively told, “we queue here for our food and the pizza always goes first!”. The fact that there was a queue there was common sense to them but not to me and thus I lacked common sense or perhaps from their point of view, common decency, either way, I simply did not notice and apologized greatly to some grumbled acceptance. The pizza was indeed rapidly devoured, and many people went without pizza and had to eat the runner-up prizes of sausage rolls, cocktail sausages and various unlabelled meats. I noted that many of these mystery meats were left at the end along with salad and anything remotely healthy-looking. Rather innocently I suggested they should buy more pizza and less of the other items, so people did not have to go without and there would be less waste. Without a hint of irony, I was told, “we’ve always ordered this”. Since it had been running a couple of decades already, I should have known there and then that I was not going to make any meaningful changes and I did indeed face the same answer to much larger issues with far-reaching implications than the lunch menu. That show is no longer on air. Do you have some good examples of where breaking away from common sense was a force for good? Or do you think I am completely out to lunch here and that only more common sense can be a good thing? |
