Imagine you’re implementing a new system across the company. You and your team have spent countless hours and dollars working on this roll-out, but the system keeps glitching and failing, which frustrates and slows down everyone trying to learn the new process. You have two options: continue to spend time, energy, and money to fix the issues OR stop the implementation. What do you do?

In our vlog today, @lornerubis and I talk about how organizations can handle these situations and encourage leaders to have the courage to stop doing things that no longer make sense.

Many of us have had this exact experience. We’re working on a project and our gut is telling us that we need to reevaluate the situation because it’s not operating like it should. But, no one feels comfortable speaking up about the issue because we’ve invested so much. After all, It takes a lot of courage to scrap a project that isn’t working out.

Not only is it difficult to stop projects that aren’t working out, but it can be hard to stop processes that have become habit. People get caught up in thinking that once they’ve committed to something it has to remain the same forever. Too often we believe that because old ways of thinking worked so successfully in the past, nothing can change.

But sometimes, this means as organizations change, they add more processes without taking anything away. This results in clutter instead of improvement.

For organizations to grow and evolve, they need to continually declutter their processes and systems. As leaders, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves: why am I doing this? Is this valuable or just how it has always been done?

Here are our main takeaways from this week’s vlog:

  1. Take the time to review where you invest your time and energy, then actively search for things to stop doing.
  2. Challenge built-in assumptions. Are you doing something out of habit or because it works?
  3. Have the courage to challenge a situation that isn’t working. It’s hard to stop something with a lot of momentum behind it, but everyone will benefit if you make that stand.

Here’s to disrupting sameness and achieving #betterwork.

Lynette.