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‘I'm glad you love Jason's doodle'. This statement came from a virtual assistant I once employed, in response to a senior HR director's email.

The response created a mighty awkward situation, but let me explain the details.

The HR director had just written to express their gratitude for a closing keynote I had recently delivered at their annual conference. In this keynote, I shared some of my visual notes from the event – ‘doodles', one might call them. The plural is important.

Around the same time, I had developed some systems to guide my virtual assistant through the complexity of my business. Virtual assistants were all the rage back then, and my business hadn't matured to the wonderful point it is at now where I have a closer and more experienced local team (in real life, not just virtually).

But yes, I'd read Tim Ferriss's fabulous book – The 4-Hour Work Week – and I was set to live the dream. I thought that, once I had a virtual assistant, everything would get easier. It didn't. It required me to establish some really good systems, and unpack my default thinking into a whole heap of default templates to live within these systems. These templates included simple things like email responses – including what to do if someone important emailed while I was out of the office or overseas:

Acknowledge their email [as in, say something nice about something they've mentioned] and then explain that I'm out of the office until [specify day and date]. Offer to be of assistance if there is anything they need urgently.

And so back to my doodles. After my presentation, the client mentioned via email something to the effect of, ‘the audience loved Jason's doodles'. But alas! My template did not capture the nuances of such things as the distinction between one's doodle and the doodles one sends through after graphically recording an event.10

Anyhoo, I thought this was a good template for a fairly repeatable task. Templates are the physical bits that make up a system and, when they work, they save us a heap of time by minimising any unnecessary duplication of effort.

For example, beyond some basic html, I don't know how to code. I wish I did, but I don't just yet. But, thankfully, website templates exist – which means I don't need to bear the cognitive burden of learning to code. I can use a template and save a heap of time and mental angst.

In an organisational context, performance reviews are a fairly common phenomena. The common intent behind performance reviews is to periodically assess an individual's productivity and efficacy in relation to a set of pre-established criteria and organisational objectives (defaults). Additionally, the process may be an opportunity to review the employee's aspirations, goals, strengths, weaknesses, learning opportunities and behaviours.

But what tends to happen is that everyone is busy, and these performance reviews become simple box-ticking activities that do little to improve things. Whole industries are designed to provide box-ticking solutions for performance reviews. In these industries, instead of having meaningful conversations, managers can simply generate a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goal, and employees can then proceed to show incremental progress towards that goal. Again, this is fine for formulaic work with predictable outcomes – but it's horrendously limiting for any organisation or leader looking to do something new.

And so, the cracks in default thinking begin to show.

Templates and systems serve our default thinking. They're the instructions and guideposts we turn to when we're uncertain about what to do. And, because we are so primed to recognise patterns and minimise cognitive strain (that is, the burden of thought required to process what to do), defaulting to the assumptions, systems, templates and structures we have already established is an incredibly alluring proposition.

Reverting to the default saves you time, thereby enhancing your productivity and efficiency. But it costs you accuracy, empathy, relevance and meaningful progress.