We’ve all faced difficult business situations when there are No Good Options. Every way you turn you face an un-surmountable barrier: no way forward makes sense. Managers are frozen. Each day that passes the situation worsens. Usually, but not always, these situations result from years of not-benign neglect; not making the appropriate and necessary smaller decisions along the way. Need a current and ongoing example? Daily headlines and blogs scream out one: our involvement in Iraq. But back to business!
Waiting and hoping--day by day--is a loser; it won’t get you anywhere. There has to be a solution but you may need to search and investigate way outside the current dialogue and debate boundaries. Apply some adventurism to your thinking process, go outside the mainstream of thought, solicit inputs from lower organizational levels--individuals not typically asked and not politically tangled up in the throes of the current debate. We have found great ideas on solving problems form within the organization. You have to listen carefully and patiently, sift through a bunch of not-good ideas, be sufficiently open-minded to expand or modify rather than reject thoughts that don't quite fit, and piece together a mosaic. But almost always there's a pony somewhere in the straw pile. This is hard work: it's also hard work to dismantle an organization from failure especially when you later realize you didn't use every last ounce of energy into rescuing it!
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