“I tried it,” Bowen shook his head. “I got stuffed. The team resisted. They told me everything was fine, that I was worried about nothing. They said, if my manager wasn’t happy with the team’s output, that was their problem. If my manager didn’t like it, he could just fire the whole team. They thought that was funny, knowing we would never just fire the whole team.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “So, what does that tell you about comfort zones?”

Bowen thought. “Comfort zones infect the way we think. It’s like a habit, so grooved that anything out of the zone must be wrong. The comfort zone looks like a position of judgement, self protecting the way we have always done things.”

“So, while habits help us routinize a process,” I said, “that habit lulls us into a sense of comfort that prevents us from seeing obstacles on the periphery. We ignore those obstacles until they become front and center. So comfortable is our zone, we may continue to deny the obstacle, call it unimportant, maybe not fair.”

Bowen looked straight at me. “I run a fine line. I want to create habits to ensure a consistency of output, that we are doing things the best way, efficiently. But, we also have to watch out that our comfort zone doesn’t cause us to deny new problems or circumstances that require a new response outside of our habit.”

I smiled. “And, how do you imagine getting your team to that point?”