By Doug Hall
Transformational ideas require a leap of faith. They require you to break free of your “adultness” to allow your mind to run free and unconstrained. This article presents one of the most direct ways that I know to open your mind (and the minds of others) to thinking differently.
I call this process Lawbreaker. It’s a method that we’ve used with dozens of our Eureka! Ranch clients searching for break-through ideas. We even used Lawbreaker ourselves to help develop a dream project of mine, creating and selling Customized Bourbon to consumers around the country. In the last section of this article, I include a case study explaining how we did it.
Challenge Accepted Systems
Lawbreaker involves attacking your challenge from the opposite of how you would normally think about it. It does this by overtly breaking the traditions, rules, policies, procedures, and beliefs that are the accepted ways of thinking or working.
There are traditions within every work process, system, and activity in both your personal life and professional life. Most of these traditions were valuable when first developed. However, some of these methods have become fixed while the world around us—technologies, training, experiences—has changed.
At their worst, these once-helpful systems have evolved into rigid bureaucratic barriers to change. The result is that they now generate more pain and waste than they enable. People spend an awful lot of time trying to improve things that should be destroyed. In many organizations, people haven’t rethought the design of systems for years. And as these systems become dysfunctional, organizations institutionalize that dysfunctionality. The main concept of Lawbreaker is to reinvent a system or product – not just patch or improve the existing one.
I recognize that the idea of “blowing up” how you do your fall yard cleanup, your work process, or even the annual big fundraiser for your nonprofit can feel terrifying. Your logical mind tells you, “It’s not really broken enough to go through the pain of change.”
I can’t decide for you what is really bad versus not bad enough to change. What I can say is that it’s at least worth doing a “thinking excursion” on what a reinvented system could offer. Just because you think about it doesn’t mean you have to pursue it.
Simple Lawbreaker
Lawbreaker begins by making lists of actions that you ALWAYS DO and NEVER DO when working on your problem area. For example, say your challenge is to find a way to make your morning team meetings at work more productive. Your list of things you ALWAYS DO might include:
- We ALWAYS take 30 minutes each day for our meetings.
- We ALWAYS hold meetings first thing in the morning.
Next, take each of these and challenge them. Adopt a perspective that a requirement of your new idea is to now NEVER DO each of the things you listed as ALWAYS DO.
- We now NEVER take 30 minutes – This could spark an idea like what if we were to split into two meetings a weekly meeting for an hour—focused on bigger issues—and a 15-minute meeting each day on the urgent issues.
- We now NEVER hold them first thing in the morning – This could spark the idea of having the meeting at the end of the day—when issues are fresh in everyone’s head. It also allows for “incubation” of ideas and thoughts overnight so everyone can start fresh.
The flip side of ALWAYS DO is NEVER DO. Here we reverse the Lawbreaker. We make a list of things we NEVER Do with our team meeting.
- We NEVER allow one person to “take over” the meeting.
- We NEVER make the meetings optional—everyone must attend.
Next, take each of these statements and challenge them. Adopt a point of view that your new idea for your team meetings is to ALWAYS do the thing that you listed.
- We now ALWAYS allow one person to “take over” the meeting – This could spark the idea of having a different team member run the meeting each day. As part of this role, they are responsible for providing a 10-minute update on what they are working on personally and what they could use ideas and advice on.
- We now ALWAYS make the meetings optional—no one must attend – This could lead to the idea of having each person record a three-minute audio or video update at the end of each day on learnings, issues, and help that they need. Have each audio/video update posted to a digital platform so all can listen and post comments on.
While not all the ideas will work out, the return on your investment of time is fantastic. the process just takes just a few minutes, and just one idea could improve your team meeting every day of every week for a year.
Why Lawbreaker Works
The name “Lawbreaker” engages a mindset of something that is different from the “proper” or “familiar” or “approved” approach to your challenge. The name itself gives you permission to change. Academic research confirms the power of being given direction to your thinking. When teams are given overt permission/direction to “think big” or “think bold” or “think radical,” they do so. Wendy Ferris, Innovation Engineering Black Belt at InVision Edge in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, described the Lawbreaker approach this way.
We are creatures of habit, and often we get caught up in the complacency of being comfortable or blinded by routine. This why I really like using Lawbreaker. It drives “what if ” scenarios and forces the mind towards change. For example, what if we didn’t have access to email to communicate . . . what would we do instead? Lawbreaker is really effective at pushing our thinking forward.
At its essence, Lawbreaker is about continuing forward with your thinking even when you believe the idea is impossible. Over my many years of problem-solving I’ve found that perceptions calling an idea impossible are rarely true. You just need to invest time doing some thinking and trust that even bad ideas are useful stimuli for creating great ideas.
The key to success with Lawbreaker is a willingness to let your mind leap to a new place. As your family, friends, or work team build trust in thinking creatively, you can simply say—let’s try Lawbreaker. And the collective power of the group becomes focused on bigger and bolder leaps of thought.
Barriers to Lawbreaker
The biggest barrier to Lawbreaker is fear of big changes. Instead of being bold and brave, most people seek the smallest, least disruptive way to make incremental improvements in how they work. In work situations, it’s common to have spoken or unspoken boundaries on how big of a change your team or organization is willing to accept. This boundary becomes a blockage to your thinking. With Lawbreaker, the goal is to think big and bold.
Lawbreaker is NOT One and Done
The reality is that big and bold ideas almost always have negative consequences to other parts of the “system” that surround your problem area. In fact, if your “big” idea doesn’t create other challenges or “Death Threats,” then it’s unlikely to be a truly transformational idea. You need to accept that your big idea will require you to create solutions to the potential negative consequences that your big idea causes to other parts of the “system” you are working on.
Using Lawbreaker to Create Customized Bourbon
At our young start-up Brain Brew Distillery, we came up with the idea to enable everyone to have their own Custom Bourbon. This set off dozens of “Death Threats,” to our probability of success as it disrupted everything from production to marketing to operations to regulatory issues. Because Custom Bourbon had never been done at scale, Lawbreaker thinking was the only way to find solutions to the multiple Death Threat problems. Here are a few of the biggest Death threats and how we addressed them.
Death Threat: Federal and State laws won’t allow for custom bourbon.
It took about a year of problem-solving at both the state and federal levels to register our custom bourbon labels. Our initial applications were rejected as non-compliant. To gain approval, we did a deep dive into the actual rules and regulations of the TTB (Alcohol Tobacco and Tax Bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department). Reading the regulations closely, we found a pathway for making our labels legal. Initially, the revised applications were also rejected, only this time based on other rules we were inadvertently breaking. Nine or so months later, after many cycles of experimentation, we got approval of our formula, label, and products, allowing us to sell custom bourbon legally.
Death Threat: Consumers won’t be able to tell the difference between the bourbons they are tasting.
Our distillery is grounded in our WoodCraft Finishing methodology. It’s based on the simple truth that 70% of the flavor and 100% of the smoothness of Bourbon Whiskey comes from the wood. We started with a set of 24 whiskeys. this proved to be overwhelming for customers. Multiple rounds of consumer testing led us to six distinctly different bourbons, each with a distinctly different taste. the unique tastes are a result of being finished with a unique wood that had been cleaned and toasted to enhance differences: 200-year Oak, European Oak, American Oak, Maple Wood, Cherry Wood, and Smoked Oak.
Death Threat: Blending whiskey is a difficult skill to learn— consumers will not be able to create a great bourbon to their tastes.
Borrowing from work we did years ago at Eureka! Ranch creating board games and user experiences for the Walt Disney Company, we crafted a “goof proof” journey for our guests. It’s a step-by-step system that starts with tasting and leads to a structured process for blending that makes it easy for consumers to craft a great bourbon that matches their taste preferences. the method we use is basically a consumer-friendly version of the actual method that Bob Dalgarno, whiskey maker of the Macallan for thirty years, taught me. It’s how he brings together barrels of whiskey from different rick houses to create a luxury whiskey.
One adaptation to Bob’s approach that we had to make was to find something to replace graduated cylinders. While Bob can quickly use graduated cylinders for measuring, it takes consumers some time to use them. this is especially true when we explain the need to measure to the bottom of the meniscus or the curved surface of the liquid. With the help of a small business in Vermont, we created and produced a patent-pending bourbon-blending ladle. It makes it easy for consumers to quickly measure and blend their bourbon with higher accuracy.
Death Threat: It will cost too much to make one custom label and bottle at a time.
Filling custom bottles manually would make the bottles cost twice the $45 retail price that our research showed was the sweet spot for pricing. To drive down cost, we had to rethink the consumer purchase and bottle production system. We started by creating a digital system that allows consumers to enter the name for their bourbon and their recipe via their phone. then custom software translates their recipe into a custom label that prints automatically.
To speed the process of filling bottles, the custom label includes a QR code on the back label that contains the recipe for the bottle. the operator simply scans the QR code, then places the bottle in the custom WoodCraft Bourbon Blending machine that we invented and built. In about 30 seconds the machine fills the customer’s bottle with the custom bourbon.
Death Threat: Custom bourbon won’t be scalable.
We quickly found that the demand for YOUR Bourbon YOUR Way was immense. However, state laws make it impossible to ship bourbon to most states. To grow our business we needed a new route to market. After exploring multiple options, we settled on franchising Custom Bourbon. It took a little over a year to navigate the laws and regulations of franchising. Recently, we opened our first WoodCraft Bourbon Blender franchise on Main Street in Louisville, Kentucky. As of this writing, we’ve now signed a second, and we expect to soon have many more.
Throughout the Custom Bourbon journey, every time we ran into a challenge we simply put our heads together and figured out a solution. Early on, we had T-shirts printed with a variation of the famous quote from an Apple Commercial, “Some call us the crazy ones . . . and we’re OK with that.”
You, too, can make the impossible possible. You simply have to love it. You have to love your idea so much you are willing to put in the time and energy required to problem-solve your way to making it a reality.
Adapted from PROACTIVE Problem Solving by Doug Hall © 2025 by Eureka! Institute, Inc. Published by Clerisy Press.
Doug Hall
