Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
We can become so accustomed to a particular way of doing things that when difficulties arise, we focus on improving the process without questioning whether the process itself still makes sense. Sometimes the greatest opportunity for progress comes not from becoming more efficient at what we’re doing, but from recognizing that there may be an entirely different way to achieve what we want.
Recently, I was looking for ways to simplify how I publish and distribute my writing across several platforms. I had established a routine that worked reasonably well. I would publish an article on my website, share it on LinkedIn, then attend to the other platforms where I wanted my writing to appear. Each required its own little sequence of activities, and I had become accustomed to moving from one to the next.
I wasn’t particularly dissatisfied with the arrangement. It was simply how I understood the work needed to be done. When I thought about making improvements, I was thinking about becoming more efficient at completing those steps, not about whether I needed to complete all of them in the first place.
Then I discovered that much of the process could be handled differently. Some activities could happen automatically, others could be combined, and several steps no longer required my involvement.
What interested me wasn’t simply the time I would save. It was recognizing that I had been looking at the entire process through the limitations of what I already knew.
I had been trying to improve the way I did something without questioning whether it needed to be done that way at all.
When Familiarity Becomes an Assumption
We develop ways of doing things through experience, observation, instruction and necessity. Over time, those approaches become familiar, and familiarity has its advantages. It allows us to work without having to reconsider every action or decision. We develop routines, establish processes and build on what has worked before.
The difficulty arises when familiarity becomes an assumption about what is possible. We stop seeing our approach as one of several possibilities and begin treating it as the natural, perhaps even necessary, way of getting something done.
When difficulties emerge, we tend to work within that understanding. We look for ways to become faster, better organized or more disciplined. We introduce tools, adjust schedules, redistribute tasks or make incremental improvements. Some of these changes are genuinely useful. But they may also leave the underlying assumptions about how the work should be done entirely untouched.
Sometimes we’re improving a process that deserves to be reconsidered.
The Limits of the Way We’ve Always Done It
This is particularly relevant in organizations, where established ways of working can acquire an authority that has little to do with their continued usefulness.
A reporting process may have been designed to address a particular concern that no longer exists. Approval requirements may remain in place long after the circumstances that justified them have changed. Teams may continue producing information nobody uses, while leaders spend considerable time making decisions that could reasonably be handled elsewhere.
Because these arrangements are familiar, the response to increasing pressure is often to find ways to manage them more efficiently. People work harder, meetings become more structured, additional systems are introduced, and everyone tries to keep up with the demands of the process.
But improving efficiency doesn’t necessarily address whether the process still makes sense.
There is also a human dimension to this. Experience gives us confidence in our judgment, and rightly so. Yet the same experience can make it difficult to recognize alternatives that fall outside what we already know. We may dismiss an unfamiliar approach because it doesn’t fit our understanding of how things work, without examining whether that understanding is still appropriate.
The challenge isn’t to disregard experience. It is to recognize that experience informs our perspective without necessarily defining the limits of what is possible.
What Changes When We Question the Approach?
I think there is value in occasionally examining the work itself, rather than immediately trying to improve how we perform it.
Why do we do it this way? What purpose does each step serve? Which requirements remain necessary? What are we continuing to do simply because it has become part of the routine? And if we were approaching the same objective for the first time today, would we design the process in the same way?
These questions may reveal opportunities for simplification, but they can also expose something more important: the possibility that we have been solving the wrong problem.
In my own experience, I initially saw the challenge as managing the time and effort required to publish across several platforms. Once I questioned the process, I realized that much of that effort didn’t need to exist. I hadn’t needed greater discipline or a more elaborate schedule. I needed a different understanding of what was possible.
Of course, questioning an established approach doesn’t mean it must be abandoned. Sometimes the existing method remains the most appropriate one. But that conclusion carries greater weight when it results from deliberate examination rather than unquestioned familiarity.
And perhaps that is the larger lesson.
The way we know is not necessarily the only way, and the way that worked before is not automatically the best way forward.
Sometimes meaningful progress begins not with finding a better way to do what we’re already doing, but with recognizing that we’ve been asking how to improve something before asking whether it needs to be done that way at all.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
What familiar process, routine or way of working are you currently trying to improve? Have you examined whether the approach itself is still necessary, or are you concentrating on becoming more efficient at doing something that could be done differently?
About Giselle
Some of the most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.
I’m Giselle Hudson, The Pre-Fixer™. I am asked to intervene when something important needs to be better understood before a consequential decision is made.
As The Pre-Fixer™, I act as a strategic thinking partner, working with leaders to examine what they are seeing, separate what they know from what they may be assuming, consider what else might explain the situation, and surface what may not yet be visible.
I don’t fix; I pre-fix. My work happens before the solution is chosen, helping leaders build the understanding from which better decisions can be made.
Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, business and the patterns that shape organizations, following the questions and observations that help us understand situations more clearly before deciding how to respond.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
