Years ago, at the end of a radio interview, the journalist wrapped up on air: “Bruno Marion, chaos theory expert.” Then she asked one last question. The kind you never see coming.
“If there were only one thing to do to prevent the collapse of our world, what would it be?”
I thought about it for a few seconds, seriously doubting my ability to answer a question that size. And I told her what seemed obvious to me:
“Say hello to your neighbour. Every day. Really every day.”
I am not sure I convinced her. Perhaps I have not convinced you either. Such a tiny action, set against crises that large, sounds like a joke.
It is, in my view, the most powerful tool we have. I call it the exponential routine, and it is the subject of this article.
A direction on its own takes you nowhere
I have written elsewhere about why, in a chaotic world, you first need a clear direction. Chaos theory calls it the strange attractor: the hidden order that makes sure that even when nothing can be predicted, not just anything happens. Where do you want to be in a year, in ten years? Answer that question and you have your lighthouse in the storm.
Except that a lighthouse does not move the boat.
This is the mistake I see most often in organisations. An offsite, two days in the countryside, a magnificent vision written collectively, a framed poster in the meeting room. Six months later, nothing has moved. Not because the vision was wrong, but because nobody repeated anything.
A direction without repetition stays a wish, and repetition without a direction is just agitation. You need both. That is what I now sum up in three words: direction plus repetition.
You may already have the direction. Let us look at the repetition.
What makes a routine exponential rather than ordinary
We all have habits. Brushing your teeth is a habit. It is useful, but it produces nothing more today than it did yesterday. Its return is flat.
An exponential routine does something else. It produces a result that feeds the next routine.
Take the gratitude exercise I practise in the evening: I look for three people or three events from the day I feel grateful for. It takes two minutes. And here is what happens next. I sleep better. So I have more energy the following day. So I am clearer in my decisions and easier to be around. So my day produces more material for the evening exercise. And so on, day after day.
This is not an addition, it is a loop. In the language of chaos theory it is called self-amplification, and it is the real name of the butterfly effect: a small initial difference fed back into the system at every iteration, until it produces a result out of all proportion to its cause.
A routine is exponential when its effect becomes the starting condition of the next day. That criterion, and that one alone, separates an exponential routine from a good habit.
The mechanism also runs the other way, and it is worth knowing. Checking the news on waking is a perfectly self-amplifying routine, only negative. You start the day with the world’s misery, so with less energy, so with less creativity, so with less effectiveness, so with more reasons to feel discouraged tomorrow. The same engine, in reverse.
One percent a day, and the mistake we all make
You may have heard of Dave Brailsford and British Cycling. His idea: improve every detail by one percent, the pillow, hand hygiene, the position on the saddle. The example has become famous, and it is useful.
But it does not quite describe what I am talking about. With Brailsford, the gains add up: one percent on the pillow plus one percent on the saddle. In an exponential routine they multiply, because each one improves the ground the next one grows in.
Run the numbers, they are striking. One percent of improvement a day for a year is not three hundred and sixty five percent. It is 1.01 to the power of 365, roughly thirty seven times better than where you started.
The problem is not that we are incapable of one percent, it is that we try to do fifty percent at once. We want the big decision, the radical transformation, the project that changes everything. And we last three weeks.
Start so small that you cannot fail
Here is the most valuable advice in this article, and also the least followed.
Five minutes a day. No more. And one single routine to begin with.
I often say that five minutes a day will change your life significantly, and fifteen minutes a day will change it radically. But I am asking you to start with five. If you are too ambitious at the outset, you will give up before seeing any result, and you will conclude that it does not work.
Mark Manson wrote a line on this I like very much: quitting alcohol will probably change your life more than climbing a mountain, and exercising three times a week for a year will do more for your mood than an expensive seminar. The actions that transform a life are rarely spectacular. They are, frankly, boring.
Choose an action so small that you cannot fail at it, and let self-amplification do the rest. Say hello to your neighbour. A kind word to a colleague. Thirty seconds to reread your direction in the morning.
The routines I suggest you try
These are the ones that come up most often, for me and for the people I work with. Take one or two, not ten.
On your own:
- Reread your direction, your vision, your dream. Thirty seconds in the morning. If you only keep one, keep this one.
- Three gratitudes: three people or three events of the day you feel grateful for.
- Forgiveness: each day, one person you forgive. Often yourself.
- The learning question: what did I learn today?
- Step outside into daylight on waking, before the screen.
- The shutdown ritual: close the laptop, two minutes of tidying, and say “done for today”.
Together, and this is where many organisations discover the real lever:
- A minute of silence to open a meeting, so that everyone actually arrives.
- The weather round: each person says in one minute what state they are arriving in.
- The talking stick: only the person holding the object speaks.
- The standing meeting, or the walking one. People dig into their positions far less.
- Sharing what you learned: each person tells the group something they picked up recently.
None of these routines costs money. None of them requires anyone’s permission. That is exactly what makes them available tomorrow morning.
What organisations that survive crises actually do
Exponential routines are not a personal development matter. Some of the most solid organisations in the world stand up thanks to one tiny practice, repeated without exception.
In 2004, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon. In its place, a six page narrative memo, read in silence for the first thirty minutes of every meeting. His conviction: writing a full sentence forces clearer thinking than lining up bullet points. Participants then speak in order of seniority, starting with the most junior, so that the youngest are not influenced by the oldest. That routine has been repeated at every meeting for more than twenty years.
At Pixar it is the Braintrust: a group of peers who examine each film in progress with total candour, without hierarchy, and with no decision making power. The director stays in charge. Ed Catmull, the studio’s co-founder, sums it up: early on, all our films are bad. It is the repetition of that candour that transforms them.
At Toyota it is kaizen: every employee is invited each day to propose one small improvement. Millions of micro improvements accumulated over decades.
None of these organisations found a big idea, they found a small thing and repeated it for twenty years. That is exactly what I am suggesting you do at your own scale.
Give yourself three weeks
One last thing, and it decides everything.
Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon turned author, observed something unsettling in his patients: it took them about twenty one days to get used to their new face. The same interval showed up elsewhere. Three weeks before a new house starts to feel like home. He drew a simple rule from it: suspend your judgement for twenty one days, and just practise.
Luca Dellanna, who has observed hundreds of companies, reaches the same place by another route. He has never seen an organisation install a lasting practice without focusing on it intensely for two to four weeks. He has, on the other hand, seen many managers remind their teams of the desired behaviour once a week for years, without obtaining any result at all.
It is not the intensity of the effort that installs a routine, it is its density in time. Three weeks of daily practice beat three years of weekly good intentions.
So here is the protocol, and it fits in three words. Try it for three weeks. Adapt it to your reality, your schedule, your company culture. Then adopt it, or not. If after three weeks you notice nothing, or the routine bores you, try another one. There is no virtue in clinging to a practice that produces nothing for you.
As always, I am not asking you to believe me. I am inviting you to try.
And if you really do not have five minutes
There are mornings when even five minutes is too much. A train to catch, a keynote to deliver, guests in the house. For those days I worked out a version that takes under a minute and that I can do almost anywhere. I described it in detail in my article on the express ritual.
The essential point is this: a stripped down routine every day beats a perfect routine once a month. It is the repetition that produces the effect, not the performance.
We have never had so little control, and we have never had so much power to influence things. A clear direction, which is allowed to change. And one small thing, repeated.
Bruno Marion is an expert in chaos theory applied to leadership and management. An international bilingual English-French keynote speaker, he works with executives and organizations in more than 40 countries. He is the author of Chaos, A User’s Guide and Not Everyone Will End Up with an Axe in the Forest.
