Guard Rails and Gamify

My Landrover needed replacement and I ended up doing something I never thought I would do, jumping ship to a Toyota Landcruisier (there is a story here about availability of service and parts for another time…).

When I first hit the very narrow country roads of upper Puhoi in the new truck (the few that are sealed and road marked) I was subject to alarms going off and braking swerving course correction. I was not happy…. 

We figured out how to turn off lane assist, however I would have to do it every time I started the engine.

I would invariably start the car and neglect to turn the function off  and I noticed that I started avoiding getting too close to the centre line around some of the tight bends. I found that my motorway driving started to even out too – again to avoid the alarms and the dragging sensation of the ‘lane centering assist’. It was like there were invisible corrective guardrails. 

If I’m honest, I was a bit shocked at how lazy my driving was. I thought to myself, what say I am not the great driver I assumed I was? What say my driving can improve? I set myself the challenge to leave the lane assist on and to avoid setting off the alarms, even on the narrow roads. 

After a short time there were a lot less alarms going off. 

By making a game of it, the invisible guardrails had started working on my driving. 

It won’t surprise you that I got to thinking about how the guard rails started off as a major irritation, became a game, and finally ended up improving my driving. 

It also wont surprise you that I started thinking about how this works in business. 

One of the major challenges we face in this industry is staying safely in our lane. We don’t want to be held back – we don’t want our speed and our ability to respond and manoeuvre to be cut so drastically by external control that we become ineffective. But neither do we want to be breaking the law, our code of conduct or our values. 

I am not sure how easy it is to gamify what we do, but I DO know that having the appropriate guardrails in our businesses will create a safer environment for us to operate in as licensees, as well as a safer environment for our clients. 

While we are all working under the same legislation the interpretation and execution varies. We see this as people come to us from different real estate businesses.

Some come to us with histories of much tight controls and tight guardrails with less room to move. Others come with experience of guardrails so far out that any intervention is seen as a bit of an insult. 

I think that probably the trick isn’t to resist the guardrails, but to design them thoughtfully — visible enough to nudge us back when needed, but not so overbearing that they sap our initiative. The right kind of boundaries can create the space for mastery, not mediocrity. As I said, I am not sure we can gamify real estate too much, by maybe injecting some challenge, self-awareness, even curiosity into how we stay in our lane—we might just find ourselves getting better without even noticing. Less because we are forced to, more because we know we will be better drivers of our careers and futures if we do.