Breaking Memory

A couple years after running my first marathon I was starting a membership at a new gym and began working with a new personal trainer. We discussed my goals and agreed on some methods for building up my body for marathons — with 2 or 3 planned for each year, with the goal of completing the Marathon Grand Slam, and with some lessons learned from recent races, I know I need to build up my core muscles. So, that’s what we planned to focus on.

I had mentioned to my new trainer that I have some pronation when I run — that is, each of my feet tends to roll inward a bit when it comes down, rather than coming down straight. This is not really a helpful thing, and can ultimately damage your feet or knees. When I would buy shoes I would aim for those that limit the pronation, but I had never thought about how to make it stop.

With this knowledge, my trainer had me do some very strange walking: first, 25 meters walking on the outside edges of my feet, then back on the inside edges, then repeating the 25m walking on my heels, and finally walking on my toes. The idea, he said, was to break through the “muscle memory” that I had developed by running this way for the past couple of years. I needed to force my body to do things differently, so it could forget what it’s used to and be open to doing something different, before I could try to run the proper way.

When the time comes for your organization to change, you too need to consider “breaking the memory.” A company has a corporate memory and often does things a certain way because that’s the way things have always been done, and it seems to work. There may come a time, though, when it does not work anymore, but switching to something new — whether it’s a new method of production, or a new product/service altogether, or new HR policies — may require you to break that corporate memory, getting people out of their routine and opening their minds to the idea of doing something differently.

What you do to break that memory does not have to be related to the changes that are being considered. You might schedule an off-site event in which you do some exercises that put people in new roles or have them do things in a way that is outside the norm. If you don’t want to take a day away from work, look at instead changing some non-critical policies in your workplace and letting people see how results can be achieved through new methods. In other words, you can “start small” and work your way up to breaking the memories where change is needed. In the case of me and my trainer, walking 25m on the sides of my feet is not going to get me through a marathon — but it was a start toward something better.

We are all creatures of habit, sometimes on purpose, sometimes subconsciously. When we try to break those habits we can create dissonance between the way things are now and the way we think they are supposed to be, and that often leads to resistance to change. It is important to break old habits before we can create new ones, but it’s also pretty tough, so to be effective at it you’re going to need to put some effort into it. Don’t be afraid to break things in order to make things.