There’s an old joke about consultants …
The consultant asks you: ‘How have you solved this challenge in the past?’ You tell them and they say: ‘Do that again’ and send you an invoice.
When you’re faced with a ‘new’ challenge take an inventory of how you’ve solved the same or similar challenges in the past.
Then, ask around to find out why you stopped doing that thing.
Sometimes it’s because that thing you were doing stopped working.
And sometimes it just stopped working for a specific reason at a specific point in time. But it would work again today. (EG: you may have done a lot of pivoting during COVID – post COVID, don’t forget to revisit what used to get you results before.)
Very often though, you’ll find there’s no good reason why you stopped doing something that used to work really well.
Management changed.
People got out of the habit.
People got busy.
People got bored.
(Hey, did you notice a common theme there?)
Try it now. Identify a current challenge and ask: ‘When we used to [get whatever outcome], what were PEOPLE doing differently?’