“No Email Fridays” is a great example of a pattern interruption applied to business. It’s a single change that has the potential to produce wide-ranging results: more focus, more productivity, and stronger relationships (thanks to communicating face-to-face instead of by email.)

Pattern interruptions are changes that don’t require a committee to plan for three months before anything actually happens. In many cases, you can just do them without much advance planning.

Imagine you are the company founder and you tend to lead every meeting. Tomorrow, you can interrupt the pattern and ask your COO to run the next gathering.

Or, instead of sitting in your office taking Zoom calls, you might decide to walk five miles and take a few calls on your walk.

Instead of brainstorming with your usual upbeat, “no bad ideas” mindset, one time you might pretend to be your competitors and look for every possible way to overtake your marketplace lead.

Two areas that are especially ripe for pattern interruptions are talent development and fostering agility.

With talent development, you can mix up roles and timing, giving people a chance to experience greater responsibilities on a trial basis. Instead of sending both a senior and junior consultant out on every engagement, try giving the junior associate the opportunity to tackle certain tasks on their own.

With agility, you can look for ways to cut through bureaucracy and get stuff done with significantly fewer steps. “What if we stopped doing credit checks for orders under $250?” is one example. Another might be increasing approval authority at lower levels for a month and see what happens.

Look for ways to change the dynamic in your organization by adjusting well-established patterns. Just remember that many pattern changes are intended to be temporary; they are opportunities to test new ideas or potential changes as well as inject new energy into your business.