That’s Not How We Draw a Car Here!

That’s Not How We Draw a Car Here!

“Daddy, this is how I draw my car. Pay attention.”

My daughter wasn’t looking for my approval; she was correcting my vision. In business, we do this all the time. We look at an innovative, out-of-the-box idea from a team member or a shift in the market, and our first instinct is to say, “That’s not how a car looks.” But are we protecting a standard, or are we just trapped inside the picture in our own heads?

Is it innovation, creativity or what?

The Car That Wasn’t a Car

My daughter came home from school one afternoon with homework. The assignment was simple enough: draw a car, put yourself and your friends in it, and describe where you’re all going. Nothing complicated. The kind of homework that’s really testing imagination more than anything else.

She sat down, took her time, and handed me the finished drawing. I looked at it and, honestly, my first reaction was confusion. What she’d drawn looked less like a car and more like a double-decker building — some people sitting at the top, some at the bottom, faces peeking out of little windows stacked on top of each other.

I did what many of us parents do without thinking. I said, “This is not a car.”

She paused. Looked at me the way children do when they know something you don’t. And she said, “Daddy, this is how I draw my car. Pay attention.”

That was it. No further explanation needed, as far as she was concerned. She wasn’t asking for my approval. She was informing me of her process.

I checked the homework instructions again. It simply said “a car” — no make, no model, no specific design. She had tires sketched in, fenders, windows, people seated, and a short description of where they were headed. All the requirements were met. It just didn’t look like the car I had in my head when I read the word “car.”

She submitted her homework exactly as she’d drawn it. And that stayed with me for days, quietly working on me the way good lessons do — not loudly, but steadily, until I found myself applying it to something entirely different: the businesses and brands I sit down with every week as a strategist.

Here is what struck me most. I was judging her drawing against a picture in my own head — a picture built from years of seeing cars drawn a certain way, cars looking a certain way. She wasn’t working from my picture. She was working from her own understanding, her own hand, her own honest attempt at the assignment. And it was complete. It had everything the task required. My discomfort wasn’t really about the homework. It was about my expectation not matching her execution.

That happens in business more often than we admit. A client comes to us with an idea that doesn’t fit the mould we’re used to. A team member proposes a process that looks nothing like how we’ve always done things. Our first instinct is to correct it toward familiarity, the way I corrected my daughter, before even asking whether the actual objective has been met.

Where “This Is How We Do It”

Every business, every brand, every startup eventually develops its own version of “this is how I draw my car.” It’s the process you’ve refined. The tone your brand speaks in. The way your team handles a customer complaint, packages a product, or closes a sale. It’s your signature — the thing that makes your brand recognizably yours and nobody else’s.

This is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s necessary. A business without a consistent way of doing things is a business without an identity. Customers need to know what to expect from you. Your team needs a shared standard to work from, or every day becomes a reinvention of the wheel. That consistency — that “this is how we do it here” — is what builds trust over time. It’s your brand’s fingerprint.

There is a season for holding that line firmly. When your product is landing well, when customers are satisfied, when the feedback loop tells you that your way of doing things is working — you don’t need to disrupt yourself for the sake of disruption. You protect what works. You refine it. You get better at your own version of the car, even if someone on the outside doesn’t immediately recognize it as one.

I see this often across Ghanaian and some businesses I work with. A small popular chop bar that’s built its name on one recipe passed down over years. A tailor whose outfits and finish is instantly recognizable in the market. Staying the same doesn’t make these businesses weak, it makes them strong. By being consistent, they aren’t being stubborn; they are protecting the long-term trust of their customers.

But here’s where it gets interesting, and where many growing brands quietly begin to struggle.

When “This Is How We’ve Always Done It” Stops Working

The trouble starts the moment your way of doing things stops meeting people where they now are. Markets shift. Technology disrupts. Customer taste and expectation move on, sometimes faster than we’re willing to admit. And the very system that once made your brand dependable can quietly become the thing holding it back.

I’ve watched this happen with businesses that have been around for a decade, sometimes almost a generation. The formula worked for so long that questioning it starts to feel like betrayal. When younger staff bring in new ideas — a new way to serve customers, a new channel, a new tone — the response from leadership is often some version of, “But this has always worked.” And the real answer nobody wants to say out loud is: it’s not that it stopped being a good idea. It’s that the world moved, and the idea didn’t move with it.

This is often less about strategy and more about mindset. It’s the CEO, the founder, the long-serving manager who built the system with their own hands and now finds it hard to imagine any other way of building a car. I understand the instinct. When something is yours, when you built it, defending it feels like defending yourself. But a business isn’t a monument. It’s a living relationship with the people it serves, and relationships require you to keep listening, keep adjusting, keep asking whether the thing you’re offering still matches what the other person actually needs.

The brands that thrive over long periods are rarely the ones that abandon their identity every time the wind shifts. They are the ones that know the difference between their non-negotiable values — the quality standard, the customer promise, the brand voice — and the methods they use to deliver on them. Values can stay fixed. Methods have to stay flexible.

Think of it this way: the destination in the story my daughter was told to draw never changed — get the people to where they’re going. The vehicle could look however it needed to look. Too many businesses freeze the vehicle and forget the destination. They protect the shape of the process long after that process has stopped getting customers where they need to go, and then they wonder why loyal clients quietly drift toward whoever finally builds a car that actually fits the new road.

Merging Innovation, Creativity, and Systems Without Losing Yourself

So how do you actually hold both — the discipline of your systems and the freedom to innovate — without one swallowing the other?

Start by asking, regularly and honestly: are we still meeting the needs of the people we serve? Not are we still doing what we’ve always done, but are we still doing what actually works for the customer in front of us today. This is a question worth building into your quarterly reviews, not just something you stumble on when sales start dipping.

Separate what’s sacred from what’s just habit. Your brand values, your quality standards, the promise you make to every customer — protect those fiercely. But the process, the channel, the format, the tools — hold those loosely. Just because a method built your business doesn’t mean it’s the only method that can sustain it.

Keep your ear to the ground and your feet planted at the same time. This is the balance I keep coming back to. You need enough humility to notice when the world has changed, and enough conviction not to chase every new trend that comes along. Innovation without grounding becomes chaos. Systems without innovation become fossils. The businesses that last know how to merge the two — bringing in new technology, new creative approaches, new ways of engaging customers, while still delivering the same dependable value that earned trust in the first place.

And give room for the version of “the car” that looks different from yours but still gets the job done. Sometimes the new idea from your team, your junior staff, or even your own child, doesn’t fit your mental picture of what the solution should look like. It might look like a building instead of a car. But if it has the wheels, the windows, the people, and it gets everyone where they’re going — pay attention. It might just be a better car than the one you had in mind.

My daughter didn’t need my definition of a car to complete her assignment well. She needed permission to draw it her way, within the actual requirements given. As business owners and brand builders, our job is often less about enforcing our own picture of “correct” and more about checking whether the real requirements — serving the customer, solving the problem, delivering the value — have actually been met.

That’s the space where growth happens. Not in constant reinvention, and not in stubborn repetition, but in the ongoing, honest conversation between what has always worked and what now needs to change.

So take a moment this week and look honestly at your business or brand. Are you still meeting the needs of the people you serve while staying true to your standards? If yes, good — protect it, refine it, keep going. If not, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Reassess. Readjust. Move quickly, because the world isn’t waiting, and your customers’ tastes are already shifting toward whoever answers that shift first.

My daughter has moved on to other drawings since, other assignments, other versions of her own creativity that I’ve learned to look at differently now. I still catch myself wanting to correct the shape of things sometimes — in her homework, in my own work, in the businesses I advise. But I try to pause first and ask the more important question: has the real requirement been met? Is the person getting where they need to go? If the answer is yes, then the shape of the car matters far less than I once thought it did.

I explore this tension between leadership, systems, and culture in much more depth in my book, The CEO, The Customer and The Culture, which looks at how leadership, structure, and culture must work together for a business to grow sustainably. It’s available online wherever books are sold — simply search my name, Bernard Kelvin Clive, and you’ll find it.

If you’d like to engage me for speaking, coaching, or consulting, visit my website at www.BKC.name and fill out the contact form, or reach me directly at bernardkelvinclive at gmail.com.

The best is yours.