Power Play: Be unpredictable

Power players never really warm to people who love the concept of predictability. They rate this word right up there with dull, mediocre, unimaginative and lacklustre.

Don’t get me wrong, predictability absolutely has its place, but top-notch Power Players understand that it can act as an obstacle to genius.

They also know it’s a comfortable word that can temper the desire (and need) for energy and brilliance and momentum. Don’t misunderstand: predictability is of course better than total unpredictability or, worse, chaos.

The point of this Power Play is that consistency is something we all tend to hide behind from time to time. Because we’re ‘predictable’ we think we don’t need to be more than that, and we trick ourselves into thinking it’s enough.

The thing is the great stuff comes from more than predictability. It comes from inspiration, it comes from magic, it comes from a surge of energy and creativity that flies in the face of predictability.

Understand the difference between the two. The most impressive Power Players always do.

The story

I worked with a guy who was so damned consistent that he’d make exactly the same speech to every single client about the importance of having a social media strategy. In fact, he was so consistent about this point that he gave the speech twice to the same client and the client finished his sentence for him.

After a while we used to mouth the words of his stories behind his back because he’d crossed over from consistent to predictable.

The next step from there is to be irrelevant. And the only thing worse than being hated is being called irrelevant.