Self-heal, Band-aids & Surgeries

Difficult hurdles can often be overcome by higher operational rigor at an individual level, team level or even cross cutting different teams.

For example, you are responding to a major client incident and need to co-ordinate surgically. A “SWOT response team” buckled with efficient co-ordination, daily updates, checklists, distributed task ownership etc might just get you through the woods.

However, fixing underlying inefficiencies within an organization is a different beast. Tackling them durably over longer term needs shift in people behavior and not a project/operational mindset.

For example, if the underlying reasons behind the above incident are lack of collaboration, ownership, alignment etc, the same operational approach just becomes a band-aid fix. You will need a different approach that modifies people behavior and org culture over time.

The next time you are tackling a beast, diagnose whether you are solving for a short term hurdle or need a longer term paradigm shift, or a combination of both.