There’s a sign at almost every public swimming pool. No running. No diving. No glass. No horseplay.
Read it closely, and something becomes obvious. Not one word about how to swim.
That sign amuses me more than it should, because I see versions of it in nearly every organization I walk into. The handbook is thick with what not to do. The policies read like a reprimand delivered in advance, to people who haven’t done anything wrong yet.
I understand why. Every rule has a story behind it, usually a bad one. But a team raised on rules learns one thing very well: where the line is. And people who know exactly where the line is tend to live right next to it.
Listen at any school gate, and you’ll hear the same pattern. Watch out for him. Don’t trust that. Be careful. We spend so much energy protecting kids from the worst of other people that we rarely stop to describe the best of them. How does a good person treat the waiter? What do they do when nobody is watching?
The strongest leaders I’ve worked with do something different. When someone does something brilliant, they stop the room and name it. They tell the story. They make good visible enough to copy.
A rule tells us where the cliff is. An example tells us where to go.
So I keep wondering: if we taught what good looks like as carefully as we teach what to fear, how much smaller would the sign need to be?
