(For some quick, impactful suggestions on how to get the most out of these weekly reflections, click here)
“Summertime” by Fresh Prince (aka Will Smith) and DJ Jazzy Jeff is a track that gets me hype no matter what season it is (and yes I know I am dating myself with this reference). One line that always gets stuck in my head is when Fresh Prince says “And if it ain’t broke…then don’t try fix it.” The line is in reference to a trend where DJs were mixing several tracks together, isolating the “get down part,” but DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince wanted the “soft, subtle mix” of this song to be left alone…in other words… “don’t try to fix it!”
There’s a related lesson though, which I’ll phrase as “If it’s broke…understand the history before you fix it.” This is a lesson I’ve had to re-learn a few times: in absence of understanding the history of how things came to be, it is very difficult to actually create a better solution or system.
One example of this phenomenon in organizational life is the current environment around corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. As a response to the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, company after company came out with strong statements, new programs and commitments to make more concerted efforts towards racial equity. While I am confident some “net good” will result from these efforts, many of the leaders putting proposals forward missed an important first step - taking the time to deeply understand how we arrived where we are in the first place. Without investing the time to understand the deep-seated history of racism, most of the proposed solutions companies put forward are targeted at the byproducts of racism, resulting in either empty promises or a failure to get at the root issues causing inequity in the first place.
This principle of “understanding history” applies to “broken things” of all shapes and sizes. (Public policy circles call this principle - the fallacy of Chesterton’s fence). For many of us, its most useful application is at a much smaller level. In fact, one of the places I see it most often is when a “change agent” leader is hired into a new organization. They come in and quickly criticize why old processes, technologies or approaches are broken. And while their perspective may be right, if they fail to understand why those processes, technologies or approaches were designed in the first place, there are two likely negative outcomes: 1) they end up coming up with a solution that only makes things worse, 2) they fail to gain the support of others in the organization for a new way of doing things.
In my own efforts to make change, I am learning to pivot to a posture of curiosity first. Instead of jumping to a critique or developing a half-baked solution, I am working to seek to understand how the “broken thing” came to be in the first place, so that I have a higher likelihood of identifying a viable solution to “fix it.”
A couple questions I reflected on this week:
What is a perceived weakness in my organization or in my community (big or small) that I want to address?
On a scale of 1-10 (where 10 = I could write a clear, data-driven one page memo), how deeply do I understand the rationale and forces that caused that issue to be the way it is?
If my answer to number 2 was less than a 10 (it will be for most of us), who are five people I can speak with to develop a more robust understanding of the history of this perceived weakness?
Based on what I learn from those five people, how has my thinking shifted in terms of the most effective way to address this perceived weakness?