Testing to learn: perception vs reality

Somewhere over time, we deemed “consistency” as “redundancy." Whether the corporate cultures around us bastardized the phrase or we simply want an easy button, I don’t know. All I do know is that “consistency” in the workplace can often mean “repeat the tried-and-true.”

The problem is, what we want to be consistent isn’t the means. It’s the ends. We want to consistently exceed expectations. We want to make others feel that same spark they felt when they first discovered us, even as they engage with us more deeply, and the exceptional becomes the norm. We want how they FEEL to remain consistent: heard, empowered, excited, inspired, intrigued, impassioned.

So we test a few things and find one thing that makes them feel that way:

But consider instead that consistently great work doesn’t ever stay the same. In fact, consistently great work consistently changes:

Their expectations constantly change, so our work better constantly change too. The way we make them feel is what we want to remain consistent, but to do that, we can’t stay stagnant.

Consistently great work consistently changes.

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