Ask a room full of people what they had for breakfast and you’ll probably get a similar response. Cereal, toast, eggs, bacon, perhaps the odd muffin or pastry. Carb-based, brown food, tea and coffee and the odd glass of juice. That’s about your lot.

Now, ask the same question to people in different countries. Again, the variance in response is tight. The difference, however, is that now you have a whole new set of answers. There are acceptable foods for breakfast, built on the rules of conformity.

There are of course the mavericks. The freaks, odd-balls and witches, who chow down on last night’s pizza, curry or perhaps a chocolate bar. The ones who are met with one of the most excepted and strangest comments you will ever hear: “you can’t eat that for breakfast.”

A comment to which there is only one response: “who the f*ck says so…?”

Who the hell told us there were rules for breakfast? Our parents, the various agencies of socialisation, cereal advertisers and the media? Whoever it was, it doesn’t excuse the fact that pretty much all of us follow these unwritten rules on a daily basis. We spend our working lives following norms and procedures that have never been formalised or written down. More to the point, they never existed in the first place. We created them ourselves. And we enforce them on ourselves.

Think about that for a second.

What can we do, as human beings, workers, managers and thinkers, to disrupt this vicious constraint in our lives? Imagine what’s possible when you stop following rules. Rules that were never there in the first place.

My son asked for a pea and ham sandwich… and this is what he got…