If it ain't broke ... break it!

In business, there are few phrases that should scare you more than “we’ve always done it this way.”

To be fair, the people who make this comment, or its close cousin, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” are most often coming from a good place: things are working well, they think, and because we’ve been successful in the past, we should keep repeating the same actions so that we can maintain that success.

While it sounds logical, “we’ve always done it this way” invites complacency and stagnation. It rejects the concept of continuous improvement and acts as a barrier to progress. It frustrates big thinkers and stifles the voices in your company that champion and embrace change. It is the antithesis of moving forward and the definition of standing still.

And when you’re trying to reimagine and transform a company, like we are at Manulife and John Hancock, it can stop you cold in your tracks.

That’s why I’m finding myself using a different phrase with increasing frequency:

“If it ain’t broke … break it!”

As we challenge our teams to imagine a world vastly different from the present, we must always challenge the old way of doing things, too. Something working adequately should not be the bar for success. Instead, the bar should be whether something works as optimally as it possibly could.

Here’s a concrete example: you have an older product on your shelf that was a great success 10 years ago. It continues to sell, albeit not as well as it used to, so if it ain’t broke… well, you know the rest. But what if that same product spawned all sorts of inefficient internal processes over the past decade, and what if the resources your company has to spend on its upkeep are stopping innovation and making it less competitive?

Is the steep price for preserving the status quo worth paying?

Asking such questions may sound easy, but it rarely is – especially when a way of doing things is firmly entrenched inside an organization.

I learned a lesson on this subject early in my career, when I landed my first job at Citi at age 17. My supervisor sat me down and told me that I was to compare a list of financial transactions on two sheets of paper. When they matched, I would mark them with a check mark. When they didn’t, I would mark an X. I understood the mechanics of the work – hardly rocket science – but then I started asking a few basic questions because I wanted to understand why I was doing what I was doing.

“Just do your job, and don’t ask any questions,” my supervisor told me. When I gently pressed, she looked down at me and said, “Are we going to have a problem here?”

I thought I’d be fired for sure – all for asking to understand my job better. Thankfully, I wasn’t, but can you imagine what would have happened if I had asked if this was really the best way of doing things?

I firmly believe companies and leaders have to embrace a change mentality if they are to be successful in transforming for the future. This means questioning even the most successful products, projects and initiatives to make room for what works better, at the expense of what has worked well in the past. Big, open-ended questions that require data, context and insight can often be the most helpful: Is this working as well as it could? Why do we do this? Is this the best way to accomplish our goal?

Those who are willing to challenge the comfortable status quo have the potential to become true champions of change and build a resilient, future-minded and innovative organization. Those who aren’t, risk being left behind.