April 6, 2010
Is Rut Syndrome limiting your potential?
I recently wrote a little article for our upcoming newsletter (sign up through our homepage at www.mcdcg.com) about the internal auditor refresher classes we offer and the benefits they provide. It got me to thinking about the idea of looking at problems from a new angle or a new way of thinking. You see part of what we do in auditor refresher classes is work with the auditors to give them new tools that allow them to approach audits from a different perspective. For experienced auditors it is easy to fall into a rut where you no longer look critically at the area you are auditing so much as go through the motions of your audit, it has become too familiar. While this blog isn’t about auditing or how to be a better internal auditor, I think that auditing isn’t the only place where we can tend to have rut syndrome.
Rut syndrome is what I am calling our tendency in life and in business to get stuck in the same groove. After a while we wear this groove so deep it’s more like a trench and it can be quite a struggle to climb out of, but if you think about it, if you are so deep in your groove that you can’t climb out of it, you probably don’t have a very good view of the world around you. This is not to say that there can’t be progress made by working in your rut, you can move forward and go deeper, but the progress at some point becomes undirected. Unless we step outside our rut to check our bearings every once in a while we may wind up grooving our way right to where we don’t want to be.
So I encourage you think about what kind of ruts you are digging right now. When was the last time you stopped and poked your head up for a look around? You may find that the landscape has changed dramatically sense the last time you stopped to examine it, and that in fact what you thought was your productive rut is actually holding you back from an even greater opportunity. Just like auditors get too comfortable with the audit process we can get too comfortable with our work, our life, our business and stop exploring and examining. At this point our rut is limiting our opportunities for growth and success.
I would also like to point out that sometimes it can be hard to get out of your rut, ruts are after all comfortable and routine. Just like it takes training and new techniques for auditors to gain a new perspective and get out of their auditing rut, there may be some techniques we can use to help us get out of our ruts and survey our surroundings. One of them that I know works for me is as simple as taking a vacation, and no I don’t mean going to a hotel where you will plug into the wi-fi and turn on your cell phone, I mean taking a true vacation from your work. Vacations from work allow you to escape the day to day run around and take a good look around, survey the surroundings, and examine the value of your rut. I am sure there are other techniques that you use to help you get out of a rut. What are they? I would love to hear your thoughts.
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