Solve Your Problem: Chuck It
The past few weeks, I've been on the front lines in meetings and I think I might have come close to death more than once. Have you read the book, Death By Meeting by Patrick Lencioni? It's about how to have, hold, and lead effective meetings (as you could probably infer from the title).
Never mind the meeting to solve things, I propose a new way of solving problems. If it's outdated by a double digit number of years, chuck it.
“Over the coming decades, an accelerating pace of change will test the resilience of every society, organization and individual. Luckily, perturbations create opportunities as well as challenges. But the balance of promise and peril confronting any particular organization will depend on its capacity for adaptation. Hence the most important question for any company is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us?” -Gary Hamel
There are times that I think an organization does things because it makes the people in the organization 'feel' better but not because it's the best thing to do. It's easy to get stuck solving a symptom rather than mending the looming larger issue. If we're still working on a grizzled issue, chances are it's actually time to toss it and re ask the question to identify the new solution. Give way for a fresh perspective.
I'm not sure how many issues this is applicable to in your scenario but I can think of a few in my own life. I'm wasting time trying to solve an issue only to realize that world is changing faster than I am.
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