I am constantly amazed and amused by the ever pervasive notion that the way to be a successful company is to do what everyone else does, or to copy another.

When it comes to running an organization, there is a constant drum-beat of guidance that is based on either what the most successful organizations did, or what everyone else is doing. Then there are leaders and managers who blindly follow the advice, or implement the changes expecting to be more successful. Then they read the next book and a year or so later, they have moved on. I have so many problems with this thinking. In this article I will talk about one of them.

Copy the Actions & Not the Thinking

Back in the 1990s, I worked a temporary job at a telephone banking call-center. Back then, telephone banking was just becoming a capability all banks needed to have, and the organization I was working for was a market leader.

My colleague and I were placed very close to the call center manager and she seemed to be regularly leading tours. One day, the manager came to check on us and my colleague asked why they were so open and honest with who seemed to be competitors. She replied that they always ask the wrong questions. “They never ask about the stuff that really matters,” she said.

There are so many examples where people look at what a successful organization does and turn their actions into a method. Motorolla found a way to drive variability out of their semiconductor manufacturing and we now have Six Sigma. In the 1990s, some American academics and engineers studied the Toyota Production System and now we have Lean. An iterative software development process was codified and now we have Scrum. There are examples everywhere.

There are some methods and standards where it seems like the origins are unclear or confused. I have heard many suggest that ITIL will make an IT organization more efficient when just reading the manuals shows that is not the case. ITIL seems closer to ISO9000 than any method designed to reduce unit costs. ISO 9000, and its parent BS 5750, were created to ensure repeatability and traceability, and that probably isn’t how you define quality.

When looking at these methods and secrets to success, the questions you need to ask yourself are: What are they trying to do? Why are they doing that? For example, what is Devops trying to do and why? My analysis suggests that it is trying to reduce the risk and costs of making changes to production computer systems. The safer and cheaper the change, then the more changes can be made more often. This allows applications to quickly adapt to market and economic pressures or to deftly find an expliutable niche.

So, what am I trying to say? When you consider a new method or recipe for success, ask yourself what it is trying to do and why? Look at the thinking behind the method and replicate the thinking. If you do that, you may find yourself reaching similar levels of success but with a different set of actions that better suits your organization.