The story goes something like this…
A couple is at home preparing a dinner of beef roast together. As he starts to prepare the roast for the oven, he takes a knife and proceeds to cut both ends off. Perplexed by his action his wife asks, “Why in the world are you wasting that meat?” To which he replies, “This is how my father taught me to cook beef roast.”
Certain that something didn’t seem right, she calls his father to ask why. The father’s response? ”That’s how my mother prepared beef roast when I was young.” They then called his grandmother. They asked her why she cut both ends of the roast off before putting it into the oven. She calmly replied that it was ”…because my pan wasn’t big enough.”
This story illustrates how easy it is to take what happens in your organization as making sense. At one time it may have, but chances are that it may not now make sense to keep doing it. In my own experience, I estimated that 20% of what people did no longer made sense - it was just wasteful. Reports were generated and distributed, which no one ever read, and procedures and processes were still followed diligently but no longer served a need.
The moral of this story? Everyday – make a part of your daily rhythm an exercise where everyone stops to ask — why are we doing this? And is it adding value to our customers? I guarantee that if this hasn’t been a regular routine in your organization, then you’ll be shocked at how much “waste” just keeps happening.
Years ago, a firm I was with brought in a new president. His daily routine was to visit a few people, introduce himself, ask what they were doing….and then the killer question: “Why?”
It made a lot of people uneasy. While most people understand the “What?” Few know why. Everyone quickly figured out that the wrong answer to this question was because that’s the way we’ve always done it before.
We are creatures of habit. Creativity takes an effort at first. Then, breaking patterns itself becomes a habit. When management begins talking about the need for, or the power of predictability, someone should ask “Why?” Predictability can be a great asset. But, only if you know why you seek it.