Hulk Smash Compliance Program!!

Hollywood has done it. Now it’s your turn.

Reboot your compliance program.

There is the “reboot” you hear from IT support when your computer is malfunctioning. It seems to always be the first response from the help desk. But once you start back up, its exactly the same computer with exactly the same programs.

Hollywood took “reboot” a step further when it started rebooting old shows, movies and franchises. They originally used the term re-image, where they did not closely follow the original. But now they have gotten much more aggressive and thrown much of the original out the window to go from ‘re-image’ to a “reboot.”

Unless you were living in a cave this summer, you know that they rebooted the Star Trek franchise. Its still the same character names and they are still on Enterprise. They shook off forty years of legacy storylines for a fresh new start.

Ronald D. Moore and David Eick rebooted Battlestar Galactica in 2003 and it finished airing last spring. The original Battlestar Galactica aired in 1978. (We won’t talk about the dreadful Galactica 1980.)  They changed many things in the new version, but kept the character names. Other than the names, they paid little respect to the original characters and even changed the genders of Starbuck and Boomer.

Like Star Trek they kept some clues to the past by keeping an actor from the original. Leonard Nimoy came back as Spock for Star Trek. Richard Hatch, Apollo in the original Battlestar Galactica, was recast as the political leader Tom Zarek in the reboot.

The reboot that inspired this post was the Incredible Hulk. The 2005 movie was a reboot of the terrible 2003 Incredible Hulk. They just ignored the 2003 version and started over. They switched out the director and switched all of the actors. Of course the movies were a reboot of the Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk TV Series, which in turn was a reboot from the original comic book. All these Hulk reboots seem to embody Hulk’s catchphrase: “Hulk Smash!!”

Do something new, pretend the old never happened.

Your aim is to end up with something better by shaking off the legacy storylines. You get a fresh creative start.

You still have the same goals and the same basic framework for compliance. Just like Star Trek was still about Kirk and Spock on the Star Ship Enterprise.

It’s not that your original compliance programs didn’t work. Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and the Incredible Hulk were successful prior to the reboot.

But it could be better, fresher and more appealing.

Smash it and start over.

Thanks to Jeffrey Brandt for inspiring this post, with his post: “Reboot” Your Knowledge Management Program. (Okay. I flat out stole his post, changed a few words and replaced Thunderbirds with Star Trek.)