Why do you do it that way?
One of my favorite questions to ask in a business is, “Why do you do it that way?”
You would be amazed at how often the answer is some version of, “We’ve always done it that way.”
Businesses accumulate things over time. A meeting gets added because communication broke down. A report gets created because someone needed a number. An approval gets added after a mistake. A process gets built to solve a one-off problem and somehow becomes part of the way everyone works from that point forward.
Individually, each decision probably made sense at the time. The problem is that we rarely go back and ask whether it still makes sense today.
Over time, those small additions become hours of unnecessary work. They can also make a business more complicated than it needs to be, with people following processes without really understanding why they exist.
Every once in a while, it’s worth looking at the things your company does simply because that’s how you’ve always done them.
Ask why.
And if no one has a particularly good answer, ask the more interesting question:
What would happen if we just stopped?
Originally published on DailyPrincipal.com by Lindsey Korell, CEO & Operational Strategist, Business Process & Operational Efficiency.