“I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line.You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking.
The TSA ’screener’ who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A ‘customer service’ rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means.”
– Seth Godin
Some people you want to be sheepwalking. Whoever delivers your newspaper, say. You want them to land it in the same general vicinity every morning, without deviation. It doesn’t call for a lot of creativity or autonomy. You want them to take the initiative to double-bag it if it’s pouring rain. But that’s about it.
Know any other sheepwalkers? How about members of Congress? They sheepwalk all the time. Not because they haven’t thought things through. They can be very creative with their rhetoric. They’re going through the motions because they perceive that the stakes are high. They could be held to account and denied re-election (or the cash that allows them to wage the next election campaign). It’s the Innovator’s Dilemma: they’ve got so much invested in the status quo that they’re unable to move toward any real change. Maybe they’re not so much sheepwalking as they are strutting about like wolves in sheep’s clothing.