Words Are Money

I came across a post this morning selling coffee mugs that read: "The seven most expensive words in business... We have always done it that way." "Seven" was double-underlined and there was a number by each of the words, presumably to make it easier to recognize that there were, in fact, seven of them. "We have always done it that way" and its variants have become common targets in pop-culture leadership because they've been enlisted as signifiers of being behind the times, or fear of change.

But "We have always done it that way," is an answer to "Why are we doing it this way?" And that itself is a stand-in for: "What are we solving for with this process?"

So maybe the seven most expensive words in business are better expressed as "We don't know what problem we're solving."

Processes are, generally speaking, instituted to solve a problem. "We have always done it that way," is a testament to the fact that processes can often survive much longer than problem statements. It's like some acronyms; one asks people what they stand for and no-one knows, everyone just uses the acronyms, because that's what they learned. Accordingly, it should be trigger to dig in, find (or reconstruct) the problem that someone was originally attempting to solve, determine if a) it's still a problem and b) the current process is a workable and efficient solution and then, make sure that it's documented somewhere accessible. Then make whatever changes are needed.

If ignorance of the problem is the expense driver, making changes in the name of performative agility or adaptability isn't going to help anything.