How Leaders Can Use The Reality Distortion Field

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Welcome to today's five minute leader. Today I want to talk about something called the reality distortion field. You may or may not be familiar with this concept, but it originally came about as a result of Steve Jobs. And the whole idea was that Steve Jobs had this ability to shape reality around him, where he was able to convince people that they could do anything where he when he would create products and services, he would convince people that they were, you know, changing the world changing people's lives. And the whole idea of this reality distortion field is that Steve Jobs was able to create this new reality for people who were around him.

And I think this is a very important thing for leaders. Now, I wanted to actually just share one story here that I pulled up about Steve Jobs and the reality distortion field. So let me just read this to you really quick, and you can kind of get a sense of what this is about. So during the development of the Macintosh computer in 1984, Steve Jobs asked Larry Kenyon, an engineer, to reduce the Mac boot time by 10 seconds. When Kenyon replied, it was not possible to reduce the time, Steve Jobs asked him, if it would save a person's life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off of the boot time? Kenyon said that he could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and pointed out that if 5 million people wasted an additional 10 seconds booting the computer, the sum of time of all users would be equivalent to 100 human lifetimes every year. And a few weeks later, Kenyon returned, he rewrote the code that booted 28 seconds faster than before.

Now, this is a cool and fun story. Because it shows that even though when people around Steve Jobs were telling him that they couldn't do something, he kept changing the reality and getting them to think in a way where they could do something. And this, I think, is a very, very important and useful skill for leaders today, as a leader of a team or function or a business, you have to be able to create your own reality distortion field.

So one of the stories that I have in my book on leading with vulnerability is from Fleetwood Grobler. And he's he was the CEO of a South African energy company, that company was $13 billion in debt. And when he took over as CEO, everybody thought the company was gonna go bankrupt, the company was gonna go downhill and the banks were going to come and repossess it. And I think he had that ability to create that reality distortion field, because when he was talking to his employees, he was telling them, I know we can rebuild trust in the eyes of our customers and our employees, I know, I have a vision of where we can go. Come with me on this journey, he created this new reality where employees believed that they could get out of this terrible and crazy mess that they were in. And that's exactly what they did.