FUQ! WHAT IF?
Why familiarity isn’t always smart – and what leaders can do about it
FUQ! What If?
Frequently Unasked Questions: Why familiarity isn’t always smart – and what leaders do instead
IF THIS DIDN’T ALREADY EXIST, WOULD WE INVENT IT?
I watched a reel recently of Rory Sutherland making this point brilliantly:
Imagine a world where the only cars we’ve ever known are electric. They’re fast, quiet, clean, efficient.
Then someone says:
“I’ve had a great idea. Let’s build a petrol car. It runs on a tank of flammable liquid. You engineer explosions to make it move. It’s heavier, dirtier, louder, more complex, harder to maintain, and breaks more often.”
“But,” they add, “you can refill it quickly. Not at home. You’ll need special locations. Still, you can drive longer than your bladder lasts.”
They’d be laughed out of the room. Or quietly performance-managed out of it.
And yet… this is exactly how organisations make decisions every day.
We normalise the familiar. We defend inherited systems. We call them practical. And we label anything unfamiliar as risky – even when the familiar is clearly no longer fit for purpose.
That’s not pragmatism. That’s legacy bias.
1. When “practical” is just comfortable
Psychologists call this status quo bias – our tendency to prefer what already exists, even when better options are available. People will actively defend flawed systems simply because they recognise them.
Layer in functional fixedness – our inability to imagine new uses for familiar tools – and something predictable happens:
- we stop redesigning systems and start optimising inside them
- we retrofit
- we tweak
- we chase efficiency inside structures that should probably be questioned, not refined
Daniel Kahneman explains why. Our fast, intuitive thinking defaults to what feels known and safe. Slowing down to question assumptions takes effort – and under pressure, effort is exactly what leaders feel they can’t afford.
So instead of asking “Why are we doing this at all?” we settle for “How do we make this hurt less?”
Often, the real answer is simply: Because we always have.
For boards, this isn’t an academic problem. It’s a risk exposure. Legacy systems accumulate drag. They hide inefficiency, create employee frustration, and quietly constrain strategic options.
2. Redesign beats optimisation
One antidote to familiarity bias is design thinking – not as a buzzword, but as a discipline of reframing.
It starts by asking different questions:
- Who is this actually for?
- What problem are we really solving now?
- What assumptions are we protecting out of habit?
Design thinking isn’t about getting it right on paper. It’s about testing, learning, and adapting before the system hardens again.
Consider organisations like:
- Netflix, which didn’t optimise DVD delivery – it redefined how people wanted to experience content.
- Canva, which questioned why design was gated by professional expertise.
- Atlassian, which challenged traditional hierarchy in favour of agile, distributed collaboration.
None of these succeeded by polishing the old model. They questioned whether the model still made sense.
That distinction matters. Optimisation improves performance inside a frame. Redesign questions the frame itself.
3. Why senior leaders get stuck first
Counterintuitively, experience can make this harder.
Research by Heidi Grant shows that under pressure, people in authority rely more heavily on past scripts. Those scripts once worked – which is exactly why they’re dangerous when conditions change.
Roger Martin describes effective leadership as the ability to hold competing ideas long enough to create a third option – not a compromise, but a redefinition.
That skill isn’t about decisiveness or confidence. It’s about reframing.
Yet many leadership models still reward certainty over curiosity, speed over sense-making, and continuity over relevance.
When the environment is shifting, those defaults don’t protect performance. They quietly erode it.
4. Organisational design is where this shows up first
People systems tend to lag reality.
Job design, performance management, career paths, succession frameworks – many are still shaped by post-industrial assumptions: linear progression, static roles, narrow definitions of “potential”.
But work has changed. So have expectations.
As Herminia Ibarra and Gianpiero Petriglieri argue, leadership development today is less about fitting people into systems and more about helping them shape systems that can adapt.
That requires:
- flexible pathways, not ladders
- learning through experimentation, not compliance
- leadership defined by contribution, not status
For boards and executives, this isn’t an HR problem. It’s a design problem with cultural, strategic and risk implications.
5. Three provocations worth sitting with
If you’re serious about change – not cosmetic improvement – start here:
1. If this didn’t already exist, would we build it this way?
What are you preserving by default rather than by design?
2. Who is this really optimised for?
Your people – or the structure that contains them?
3. What are we solving for: efficiency, effectiveness, or experience?
Some processes need streamlining. Others need reimagining. Knowing the difference is leadership.
These aren’t comfortable questions. But they’re necessary ones.
Because in an environment shaped by AI, complexity and constant disruption, progress rarely comes from improving the past. It comes from having the courage to ask what if – and the discipline not to rush back to what feels familiar just because it once worked.