The Tyranny of received wisdom

I wanted to write about the challenges of received wisdom and the Not Invented Here approach to kill productivity today.  For some reason, normal, rational people will accept the lamest, most ridiculous excuses for why certain things just aren't done in a firm. There's an elephant in the room, and everyone pretends not to notice.  Eventually, this becomes standard operating procedure, and is documented in an ISO certified procedure manual.  It's like something from a Douglas Adams novel. 

It strikes me that we all live in fear in our businesses of the conventional or received wisdom about how things should work.  In fact a lot of times we accept at face value things we are told are true within our businesses without ever investigating them to determine if they are true.  This fear presents itself in several forms:

1.  The not invented here (NIH) approach.  You've seen this one before.  Any idea that you come up with, someone will attempt to shoot it down as being different and not something the firm has done before, or worse, someone else has done already.  If the idea was not invented in your firm, that does not make it a bad idea.  In fact it may give creedence to the idea.

2.  The "We've never done that before" response.  This one's my favorite.  Every day you do things you've never done before, or you should.  The fact that your organization has never done something before (which in itself is probably not accurate) is really irrelevant.  Your actions and decisions shouldn't be based on whether or not you've done something before, but whether or not the action or project is a valuable one and one you believe you can achieve.

3.  The mythology of the firm.  Every firm has a mythology.  These are the stories from long ago when heros like Achilles worked in the firm and did Great Things.  Too bad there aren't any heroes anymore.  Too many firms become complacent and staid.  It seems that only the Heroes were allowed to think big and take risks.  The mythology of the firm would have you believe those days and those people are gone.  Now we only work on the boring and the mundane.

4.  The received wisdom.  Here's a shameless plug for the other blog I write, Innovate on Purpose, because I wrote about some of the received wisdom that stops people from being innovative, and how really flimsy most of the received wisdom in our businesses really is.  Every firm I've ever worked for had some received wisdom about how difficult or dangerous or impossible certain tasks or projects are, based on some received wisdom.  This received wisdom creates a real roadblock to change and is quite often wrong.

Look, I'm not arguing that you should run around within your firm overturning all the sacred idols and challenging every corporate assumption.  What I am telling you is that you should carefully consider what passes for knowledge and wisdom, especially when someone tells you something "can't" be done here.  Much of what passes for this received wisdom is simply fear of the unknown or fear of change, and it is probably holding your team, your project or your firm back from greater success.

Comments

[Brett]

Good read, but your link to "Innovate on Purpose" is broken.