Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Written by Jeffrey Brandt  | 01 March 2010

It’s a simple set of instructions, really. I suspect you can find it on bottles in every household around the world. They are easy to follow (so easy apparently they actually don’t even appear on the shampoo bottles we use for the children - I checked) they vary slightly (on my wife’s bottle they recommend you follow on with the high end conditioner by the same company) One might even say they are timeless. Which in turn, begs the question, when do you stop? If you take them literally, you’d run out of shampoo every time you washed your hair. Of course, common sense tells you to stop sometime before you empty the bottle, but when exactly have you reached your goal? When have you solved your problem?

So where did all the sudsy shampoo thoughts come from? From David Gurteen. I was reading his short blog post “There are no solutions!” http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/no-solutions and that’s what struck me: no solutions = lather, rinse, repeat. I’m going to try to take David’s advice and try to eliminate the words “solution” and “solve” from my vocabulary. He is correct - there are no true solutions, no definitive answers to business. There are only responses to issues. If perhaps we could freeze time or reduce the variables to zero, then, perhaps, we could claim a “solution,” but to my knowledge time only stops on the SyFy channel.

In the business world, you get presented with your issue (Side note: I’m going to use the more neutral word issue. You can substitute the words “problem” or “opportunity” as your view on the world dictates) and you respond. If you respond well, things get easier. If you respond poorly, things get harder. Then the next issue comes along and you respond again. The process continues ad-infinitum. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Iteration is the way we learn. Anyone with small children knows that they can enjoy countless repeats of Dora or Diego or even Beverly Hills Chihuahua (but that’s another story)

IT folks (amongst which I count myself) have a tendency to like one time solutions. Vendors love to sell solutions. In part, I think, it comes from the binary nature of computers and people who work with them. But we all know that’s not really the case. We buy and install the software solution in response to a business issues. But a good business doesn’t sit still, it moves, changes and morphs according to the market. Good software never remains static either. Our software solutions gets minor and major upgrades. So we install the upgrades. We move from MS Office XP to Office 2007 to Office 2010. Sometimes that new software requires a new OS or better hardware. So we take time out to replace the old hardware. Sometimes we change out one software vendor for another. Any way you slice it, it’s “lather, rinse, repeat.”

So when do we stop? Does the bottle ever run out? The simple answer is you stop when there are no longer business issues to respond to. Do you have all those alternative fee issues resolved? Have you worked out how to negotiate the legal outsourcing? Have you figured out how to provide greater transparency to your clients? Have you perfected the communities of practice in your firm? I didn’t think so. The not so simple answer is we never stop.