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| 9/07/08 | | Avoiding reinventing the wheel |
When we help organisations develop their knowledge strategies we encourage them to focus their efforts on a few areas. We have listed some of the areas that have emerged in past projects and we tend to use this list as a starting point. One of the focus areas is 'Avoid reinventing the wheel' and I was thinking, what one behaviour could you change that would have a major impact in achieving this objective?
Perhaps this is it. Whenever a proposal is put to a leader they ask these questions:
Have we done this before? What happened then? Please demonstrate to me that you have done a good job looking.
Has anyone else done this before? Can we find out?
I can just imagine what might happen the first few times these questions are asked. The proposer returns to their desk and asks if it is at all possible to find out what has happened in the past. Some solutions will be offered but there will be gaps and new approaches will be required. The business lines will then put pressure on the services lines of the business to provide a solution. Improvements will be made and the organisation will incrementally improve their ability to avoid reinventing the wheel.
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Comments
The issue is always over the definition of "wheel" and a search discovers that we have done something like a wheel before but that one was white and now we need a red one. The inexact art is deciding whether it is easier to build the red wheel reusing the techniques used for the white one or to build it from scratch. I've seen may attempts to reuse ideas, particularly software code, fail because the differences between the two cases proved to be greater than first thought. Sometimes reinventing the wheel is the right thing to do.
Posted by: Matthew at July 10, 2008 5:51 AM
How about Kevin Kelly's compiled-negative-results, both encouraging the habit of logging, recording, writing (even sharing, gulp) and also to embrace-failure not as failure but as (joint) exploration.
Posted by: ken at July 10, 2008 6:17 PM