Alpha Blocks

From Blocks to Bucks

Several days ago, my son was playing with his toys when he decided to push a few through a cutout in the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Once they were all through, he decided that he wanted them back. So, he reached through the cutout and started pulling them back through, one at a time. The first couple were small and passed through easily. The last toy though was a wooden block that was almost the size of the hole. When he tried to pull it through, his hand got stuck because the hole wasn’t large enough to accommodate his fist as long as it held the block. I watched him struggle to pull the block through until he cried out in frustration, then showed him that he could reach around the chair back and get the block back that way. Then I took his hand and had him do the same. Once he had the block, he pushed all the toys back through the hole and the scene repeated itself. For some reason, he really wanted that block to come back through the hole the same way the other toys had, instead of the way I had shown him.

Now a lot of you might be wondering why I brought that story up. “Is this a daddy blog in disguise?” some of you might be asking. If that has you worried, relax. If you are excited that I brought my son up, well…he might come up from time to time. The reason for that is simple. Some situations that we encounter seem daunting because there are so many factors at play. If you boil a situation down to something simpler though, it becomes easier to understand. So, rather than start off with a complex business issue, what could be simpler than the issue of a toddler?

In this case, we have what looks like a simple problem with a simple solution. A little boy wants his block back, but it won’t fit through the hole. Simple solution. Teach him to reach around the chair back. No problem! If you show him the solution, he’ll latch right onto it, right? Well, as you remember, that isn’t the way it went. He wanted to go right back to the way that worked for all the other toys. It didn’t work, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to try.

The behavior seems illogical, but he’s just a kid and he is still learning, right? True, but adults behave the same way sometimes. Not sure about that? Let me give you an example. Let’s say that ABC Plumbing tracks the hours that employees spend serving customers. Mr. Smith, the owner of the company, wants employees to account for the time they spend with clients, purchasing supplies, traveling between jobs, etc. Basically, the boss wants to know how everyone is spending their time at work, so that he knows what is going on with his business.

When the business started out, each employee had a time sheet that they filled out during the day. When the employee clocked out at the end of the day, they handed in their time sheet. Mr. Smith tallied up the numbers with a calculator and filed the sheet away. After a few years, Mr. Smith hired a secretary and gave her the responsibility of handling the time sheets. Years later, ABC Plumbing had 50+ plumbers working in five cities and that system became too cumbersome for his secretary to handle. The secretary suggested a computer system to handle the paperwork, but Mr. Smith said they didn’t have money in the budget for a new computer and the appropriate software. Instead, he hired someone to handle the paperwork for $10/hr.

Ok, now I know that some of you are thinking that this is ludicrous behavior and that no company would ever behave this way. Others are nodding sagely to the first group saying, “Oh, you’d be surprised.” If you doubted, you would be surprised to hear that this example is based on a real world scenario. Of course, I’ve changed the details to protect the real company. In fact, the real situation was worse than this because the solution would have required an outlay of hundreds of dollars that would have been recouped in the first couple of days from the savings on the new position alone. I thought the decision was a no brainer, but sometimes that’s the way that businesses and budgets work. They throw brains out the window.

Instead of trying something new that will work much better than what is already in place, companies often stick with the “tried and true,” even when the “tried and true” way of doing business is breaking down under the load. In those cases, businesses often don’t change until the existing system collapses or costs them large sums of money in lost revenue, extra expenses or lost employees. By that point, it is often harder and more expensive to convert to a new system. So, in the end, the company loses quality employees, large amounts of money and eventually spends even more on implementing the same system.

There are so many reasons why a company might behave this way and some of them are better than others. I will not go into them here because that is not the point of this post. It is also not the point of this post to point out how stupid companies are or to show how smart I am. The point is to show how anyone from a toddler to the head of a company can make a similar mistake. In this case, the mistake is not being open to new ways of thinking or not putting that new way of thinking into practice. If we are open to new ways of thinking, we have many more opportunities to be more successful. You can’t always do things the way you have in the past. Like accountants like to say, “Past performance is no indication of future results.”

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