NOW! Fail or Thrive Excerpts for Busy Leaders by Ronald D. Sears - HTML preview

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Dead Horse Theory

“If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.”

Jack Dixon

The tribal wisdom of the Lakota Sioux Indians of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount”

Key Points

However, governments, educations, and corporates most of the times choose more advanced strategies, such as:

• Buying a stronger whip!

• Changing riders!

• Appointing a committee to study the horse!

• Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses!

• Lowering the standards so that the dead horses can be included!

• Re-classifying the dead horse as living-impaired!

• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse!

• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed!

• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance!

• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance!

• Declaring that the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and, therefore, contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses!

• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. And of course…!

• Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position!

Although all of above solutions are funny, they are completely serious! Lots of people, companies, and even countries are taking these decisions instead of the rational one.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

The main problem of these decisions is not seeing the root cause. The root cause analysis is one of the most fundamental concepts to improve any process. Root cause analysis (RCA) is defined as a collective term that describes a wide range of approaches, tools, and techniques used to uncover causes of problems.

Don’t defend the dead horse (strategy, project, etc.). Don’t keep doing things that aren’t delivering results or making the desired impact. Don’t go from one dead horse to another. Fix the things (people, processes, systems) that are broken. “Time to get a fresh horse.”

In the 1958 movie, Teacher’s Pet, in which Clark Gable plays a successful, but uneducated editor of a New York newspaper, and Doris Day plays a professor teaching a journalism class. The theme of this romantic movie evolves around which is more important, education or experience? Clark Gable concludes that “experience is the jockey, education is the horse.”

Additional Reading

The ASQ Pocket Guide to Root Cause Analysis by Bjørn Andersen, Tom Natland Fagerhaug

Point of Reflection

"The definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"

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