No one knows for sure, but it appears that April Fool’s Day has its roots in April 1, 1582. This is the year that the Council of Trent had decreed would be the year when the new Gregorian calendar would be used in place of the old Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar made January 1 New Year’s Day, not April 1 as it had been on the Julian calendar. Now it had been 19 years since the Council of Trent issued their mandate that the calendar would change in 1582, however, some people either didn’t get the news, forgot about it, or were just too stubborn to change. Thus, when they celebrated New Years Day on April 1^st, they were ridiculed as "fools.” People hung derisive signs on their backs. As the years passed, the day found traction as a traditional day for pranks, even though people forgot about the old Julian New Years Day. Those traditions were regionally located, even though the day was the same from country to country. For instance, in Scotland, the unsuspecting were sent on a Gowk Hunt on April 1. (A Gowk is a cuckoo bird, attributed to the poor sap that got roped into this hunt.) They were sent from house to house with a note supposedly asking for a specific item to be retrieved and brought back. Unbeknownst to the knocking Gowk, the note simply implored the person answering the door to, sober-faced, tell the Gowk to go to another house a mile or so away and show them the same note. This went on until the Gowk finally realized they were being made the fool of the day.

Gowk Hunting seems to have taken hold only in Scotland. Don’t ask the Irish to go on a Gowk Hunt on April 1. They will tell you where to put the Gowk if you try! This brings me to a dilemma about traditions. What may be acceptable in one place is seen as pure folly in another. It is never more evident than on April Fool’s Day each year.

I am reminded that businesses have traditions as well. As the world becomes a smaller place for doing business, those traditions many times can be misinterpreted, especially if you are unfamiliar with a regional or national tradition. For instance, if you were doing business in Japan, you would be expected to drink green tea in a casual atmosphere with your customer before you got down to business. You would be expected to give a gift of your appreciation to show reverence for your customer. In other countries, that would be seen as a bribe. Not in Japan. You would also be expected to show great reverence for the person’s business card, holding it with two hands while you bowed and read it aloud. In the U.S., we have traditional holidays that are days off. For instance, the fourth Thursday in November is Thanksgiving Day, Memorial Day is observed on the last Monday of May, and the Fourth of July is on the Fourth of July regardless of the day on which it falls. These are uniquely American traditions that are not recognized anywhere else. What if your Japanese customer decides he needs you to work on Thanksgiving Day? Will you be bowing to his business card then? This is where the traditions begin to clash.

However, you don’t have to cross the ocean to find differences in traditions. The traditions of domestic companies can have their day and night differences. I have customers who have held to a tradition of precise work hours. When the clock strikes 8:30 a.m., everyone is to be at their desks and working away. When the clock strikes 5:00 p.m., they are to be exiting the building, as if something terrible would happen if they stayed in the building until 5:01. This is based on a manufacturing model of business, when everyone shut the machinery off at the same time to take a coffee break and started it all up precisely 15 minutes later. Other businesses are more casual about the time they work. Offices have relaxed work hours, dress codes and the like in lieu of a flexible schedule. The problem is that some people have trouble maintaining a sense of when it is time to work and when it is time to play. When these two work world traditions collide, there can be sparks. If Company A calls Company B at 8:30 a.m. to get an answer to a pressing question and finds that no one has arrived at Company B until a quarter to whenever, there is frustration with the loosy-goosy manner in which Company B operates. If Company B sends a text to Company A on the weekend, there is frustration if the contact at Company A does not respond until Monday morning at 8:30 a.m.

So what do you do with the traditions that get entrenched in your work world? First, don’t be so inflexible that you cannot change. The business world is constantly remaking itself. The walls of status quo have been knocked down. You cannot be so entrenched in your traditional system that there is no room for anything new. On the other hand, most people don’t do well working in a structure-less environment. Traditions have their place in maintaining some sort of order. They help define normal, especially on days outside the norm – like April Fool’s Day. They help us all know that for this particular day, we will tolerate a certain amount of crossing the line, but the tradition helps define that line for us. On April 2, the tradition tells us, it is back to work again and the time for Gowk Hunting is put aside until next year.

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1 April, Hunt-the-Gowk, Fada’s Farsaing Far and Wide, http://www.scottishradiance.com/far/far402.htm

Apr 1, 1700: April Fools tradition popularized, This Day in History, History.com http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/april-fools-tradition-popularized