The Missing Reality Gene

Years ago, I worked for a boss who was incredibly demanding. He had a vision of what he wanted to accomplish, and he wasn’t particularly interested in hearing why something couldn’t be done.

We used to joke that he had a “Missing Reality Gene.”

And believe me, it wasn’t intended as a compliment.

I remember one particular exchange.

We were working on something new, and he wanted to make a change that I believed would create significant problems.

He asked me, “Why can’t we change something that didn’t even exist a month ago?”

My response was pretty straightforward.

“Once you’ve laid the first level of the pyramid, you can’t just change what you’re doing with the second level.”

To me, this was obvious. Decisions create dependencies. You can’t simply ignore the work that’s already been done because you’ve come up with a different idea.

I was being practical. Or at least that’s what I thought.

And to be fair, I wasn’t necessarily wrong.

But neither was he.

I’ve thought about that exchange many times over the years, and my perspective has changed considerably.

I spent much of my career leading large, complex programs. In those environments, understanding reality is critically important. Resources are finite. Decisions have consequences. Dependencies are real. You can’t simply wish those things away.

But I’ve also come to appreciate something else.

Reality can become a constraint on our imagination.

We become so familiar with how things work that we stop questioning whether they have to work that way.

Experience and knowledge are wonderful things. They help us avoid mistakes and make better decisions. But they can also become barriers to imagining something different.

We know too much about why something can’t be done.

And sometimes we forget to ask whether it should be done anyway.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit as I’ve started my own consulting business.

Starting something new requires a different relationship with reality. If you only focus on what exists today, you may never create something that doesn’t exist yet.

I suspect many successful entrepreneurs have at least a little bit of that missing reality gene.

They look at something that everyone else accepts as a limitation and ask, “Why?”

Sometimes they’re wrong.

Sometimes they’re spectacularly wrong.

But sometimes they’re the ones who change the world.

Looking back, I have a much greater appreciation for that former boss. Someone we once joked was missing a reality gene is now someone I consider a great leader.

That doesn’t mean every unrealistic demand was a good one. And it certainly doesn’t mean that ignoring constraints is a sound management strategy.

I still believe that good execution requires discipline, precision, and an understanding of consequences.

But I’ve come to believe that great leadership also requires the willingness to challenge what everyone else accepts as reality.

Maybe the real challenge is knowing when to respect the constraints and when to question them.

And maybe the best teams have people who do both.

As for my former boss?

What I once considered a defect, I now see as something pretty close to a badge of honor.

He had a missing reality gene.

And perhaps the rest of us could benefit from missing just a little bit of ours.