Status Of The Status Quo

"That's just how we do it."

Yep, a great killer to innovative thinking - hiding behind the status quo as if the way we do business was handed down from a burning bush on the side of a mountain. Volumes have been written on this subject, but I am still surprised that this thought along with the ever popular "the system made us do it!" are still allowed to kill creative thinking. Especially in mid-sized companies that should still be nimble enough to know better.

I have found that when faced with offering an alternative to the status quo, just keep it basic and use three simple steps: Analyze, Identify, and Overcome.

1. Analyze the idea or concept - are there facts, figures, and information that may paint a different story than the tribal knowledge of the status quo
2. Identify potential solutions and their barriers - how else can we approach this issue and what stands in the way of implementing our new approach
3. Overcome the barrier and move forward - try it and see if it works. If not, switch gears and try something else

As you try different approaches keep in mind that if you are going to fail, then fail fast. This eliminates solutions that won't work in practice, and allows an even better approach to be pursued.

Here's an real world example with the issue being parts consolidation:

"We can't eliminate published options because we get orders for them. If we didn't, then they would not be on our Price Sheets."

Analyze the concept - we seem to have 15 options that all accomplish the same thing. Do customers really want 15 options our would 2 work better? Looking at hard sales numbers, 12 options account for only 2.5% of our volume over the past 5 years.

Identify potential solutions - we can eliminate all 12 options and push customers into the remaining 3, thus eliminating 80% of the option codes (and parts carrying costs) in this category. Sales may not be happy with this approach, though, and Order Entry will have to rework the pricing sheets, while IT may have to do some work on the ordering system to update the changes.

Overcome the barriers - after talking with key players in Sales, Order entry and IT, they are good with making the change because fewer options means fewer opportunities to make front end errors - a little work now will pay off with less work down the road.

Fail Fast - we soon learned that 2 of the options we eliminated are tied to either a specific customer or a different product line, so we will add them back into the mix.

Final tally: consolidation of 15 part numbers into 5. Seems we can eliminate published options after all.