In a previous role as a Cloud technical Lead I wore several different hats. Cloud solution architect, team leader, general problem sorter and occasional chaos tamer. Marketing had been pestering me to write a blog for the website and being the technical lead, I suspect they wanted something of a technical nature. However, I thought I’d go down a different path.

One evening I was sat watching one of the best films ever made.

The Matrix.

I love this film so much I even bought a long leather jacket at the time and a Nokia phone that flipped out (the jacket was quietly shuffled off to the charity shop a few years ago when my wife found out I still had it and the phone flipped it’s last flip years ago)

One thing I always struggled to understand is the phrase “There is no spoon”.

I never really got it. It felt like one of those cryptic statements that sounded philosophical but didn’t quite connect.

It wasn’t until much later that I finally understood what it meant and how perfectly it applied to the way we work.

We’d been through quite a lot of change at that company, and it had been (mostly) for the better. We’d got good teams of people working on improving things internally which reflected on better customer experience. It was also about putting things in place to help us grow for the future and be better at what we do.

I equate these changes in the business to us being pulled out of the matrix and the rules being changed. Understanding that we can do things that we couldn’t before. We now understood the restrictions we had put on place in the business. Our “spoons” the things we thought could not bend, were often old habits, outdated processes, or instructions we had simply never questioned.

We were just like Neo in the matrix, he’s used to living in the matrix and fitting inside its rules. Why would you challenge the rules when that’s all you’ve ever known, why question things that appear to be a fundamental rule? When he is pulled out of the matrix it takes him a while to understand that what he believed was real, isn’t. It would be impossible to bend a spoon. But there is no spoon. The spoon doesn’t exist.

But once you step outside that perspective, you discover that many of those rules weren’t real at all.

The whole train of thought with this came about because someone said to me, they couldn’t do something because of “X”. And just like Morpheus (minus leather jacket) I asked them why they felt that way. They were so used to being told it had to be done that way, they never really thought to challenge this or try another way of doing it.

This was their spoon

Just in the way you wouldn’t question a spoon being a spoon, they hadn’t thought to question the process. If you can’t change the way someone has told you to do something, maybe there might be a better way.

Otherwise, if we never question things and try to improve things, how are we going to get any better?

This is why challenging assumptions mattered so much in that role. Not to be disruptive, but because improvement only happens when we rethink the things we believe to be immovable

We want to be stopping bullets, running up walls and bending spoons (Not literally, but also dressed in a cool leather jacket) challenging the norm and asking ourselves if what we believe to be true, actually is.

What if the rule isn’t really a rule?
What if the limitation isn’t actually there?
What if there is no spoon?