I was in a session about coaching for high performance yesterday when the speaker made reference to the QWERTY keyboard:

The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee.

With the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule he built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867.^[3] However, Sholes’ "Type Writer" had many defects: the printing point was located beneath the paper carriage, and so was invisible to the operator. Consequently, the tendency of the typebars to clash and jam if struck in rapid succession was a particularly serious problem, in that the mishap would only be discovered when the typist raised the carriage to inspect what had been typed.^[4]

Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine’s alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes. Eventually he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard. In 1873 Sholes’ backer, James Densmore, succeeded in selling manufacturing rights for the Sholes-Glidden "Type Writer" with E. Remington and Sons and within the following few months the keyboard layout was finalised by Remington’s mechanics. Their adjustments included placing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period mark, thus enabling salesmen to impress customers by pecking out the brand name "TYPE WRITER" from one keyboard row. Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the "home row" sequence FGHJKL.^[4]

In essence, the QWERTY keyboard was created to reduce the instances of typewriters getting jammed, a need that has long since disappeared – yet the QWERTY still exists. This has lead to the QWERY becoming a great example for us to ponder daily. Many things (rules, processes) exist today even though their original purpose no longer exists. As a leader, one must probe to find the original purpose to determine validity and ensure that the old paradigm is not holding the business back.

Two other points that I found worthy of noting:

• An oldie but a goodie: ‘When you point your finger, notice how many fingers are pointing back at you’
• ‘The only difference between a rut and a grave is depth’