“Just once, I want the opportunity to sweep everything off the table to make room for a giant map that I’ll use to explain the plan.”
- Asher Perlman, Monday Morning Memo, September 26, 2022
One of the best scenes from Apollo XIII is when Ed Harris’ character brought in the box of items and said something along the lines of “We have to get them back from the moon with what’s in this box…”
We’ve all seen the movies where the table gets wiped clean and the map gets laid out and everyone says, “Gee, why didn’t we think of that?”
The gesture is grandiose, and it might be overly so.
The process, however, is worth considering.
“All this “stuff” we’ve been focused on is still here, even when we’re not focusing on it,” we might say. “Someone take a picture of that white board before I erase it and let’s start over from scratch.”
On the blank white board, we can start with ideas like “it’s (some date in the future) and we failed because…..” Or, “this solution we use in the mix for our primary revenue driver is found to be toxic, it’s price triples and we face regulatory pressure to change our mix…how would we do it?”
The idea of starting from the proverbial blank slate isn’t bad at all. We ought to go into it without tossing all our crap on the floor, and without the expectation that within a few minutes, we’ll have the answer dropped in our laps.
Try new things. Test them. Try a couple things off the learnings. Test them. One. Foot. Ahead. Of. The. Other. Less grandiose. More better.
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