I once worked somewhere where a senior leader had a marketing idea he kept coming back to, and every time he raised it, the head of that service told him they’d tried it before and it hadn’t worked. The leader didn’t force it through at the time, but almost as soon as the head of service left he pushed the idea through, and it failed.
What makes this interesting is how the two of them saw each other. The leader saw a dinosaur whose years in the job had made him resistant to anything new and who was keeping the service from staying fresh, while the head of service saw a senior manager butting into an area he clearly knew nothing about, and neither view did either of them any good.
The objection had a reason behind it, and a factual one: the idea contradicted the way buyers bought that service, and had the leader taken the time to understand that, he would probably have been convinced himself. He didn’t, because he’d already decided the objection was fixation. The head of service, feeling dismissed, didn’t bother explaining, and my guess is that the perceived disrespect, more than anything, is what stopped him.
There’s something to be said for the leader, who believed in an idea and wanted to try it, and who was right that experience can harden into fixation. When ‘we’ve tried that’ becomes the answer to every new idea, nothing gets tested and a service goes stale, and a leader who never pushes against that isn’t doing the job.
But experience is expensive to get, and every ‘that won’t work’ is a conclusion someone reached, often the hard way, with its value sitting in what’s underneath it. So when someone with experience tells you an idea won’t work, ask the next question: why, what happened last time, and was it the timing, the funding, the people involved, the policy context or the way it was delivered? Break the conclusion down into the factors that produced it and go through them together. If those factors are all still in place, the conclusion stands and you’ve saved yourself time, money and a failed project. If some of them have changed, there’s a case for trying again, with the person who tried it last time helping to shape how.
That’s the balance a leader has to hold: making room for new ideas to be tried while respecting the people who’ve seen them tried before, and using their experience to decide which new ideas are worth trying, how to try them and why.
The same thing is playing out on a much larger scale across the public sector right now. Devolution, the on-off reorganisation of local government, changes to the NHS and the move towards insourcing and public ownership all have elements that have been tried before, and there are people within the system who remember what worked and what didn’t. Leaving those people out of the process would be a mistake, just as handing them a veto over anything they’ve seen fail before would be. The leaders who get this right will be the ones who bring that memory into the room and ask it the next question.
