The Stupid Lesson of Reinventing the Wheel
In most cases, everyone will tell you, "Don't reinvent the wheel!" to avoid pointless effort on doing something from scratch. It might be true for most cases, but not always.
Sometimes, no, usually, people tend to fall into a routine, doing the same thing over and over in a play called standard operating procedures. Great SOP, of course. Inline with ISO standardizations, acknowledged as a Key Success Indicators for your business and it feels stupid to "Reinvent the Wheel", right?
Some of you might already guess what I want to talk about. I think most of you will be smarter than me actually. But no, I won't talk about innovation, enhancing creativity, think outside the box or something like that. What I want to point is something simpler than that, which some of you might think it's not worth to think about.
For me, sometimes organizations, even individuals need to reinvent the wheel once in a certain amount of time. When you have been using the perfect wheel over and over and over and forever, there is a huge risk of forgetting why it has to be done in the first place. Example.
"Good morning, thank you for calling Halo XYZ, this is Carter speaking, may I help you?"
That is an example of a standardize phone call answering line. It has been taught to all of XYZ's customer service team and call center team. It is good, polite and clear, and everyone likes it, so why should we reinvent the wheel?
This line is spoken for thousands of time for a month, nothing goes wrong, except one. Some of the call center attendants begin to think of this as a routine, they lost the essence of the line. Which is to exercise empathy towards the customer, and an eagerness to make the customer feel better from their service. They forgot to smile when receiving calls, they only focused on their target, how many calls do they have to answer, how much sales they have to make, etc.
If that happens, please, reinvent the wheel for them. Reinvent the reason why we need the wheel? What is the purpose of the wheel? How a wheel should be? Why there are certain parts inside the wheel? Is this wheel is still contextually relevant with today's requirements?
When we practice certain things over and over, we tend to act ignorant about that particular thing. We forgot to ask why should I do this, and start doing an "auto-pilot" just because it should have been done in the first place. For me, doing something without a cause is worse than not doing anything. I can compare a business that doing something without a cause with someone who doesn't know why he/she has been born all this time. Pointless. From what I've learned and experienced, this applies to everything that we do, in every aspect of our life, business, and relationships.
Don't feel stupid with reinventing the wheel when it has to be done, being ignorant is the true stupidity in one's life. Keep asking, what is the purpose of doing certain things before start doing that. If we proved to be smart enough, we might find one or more ways to innovate on how it should be done in regards to efficiency, effectivity, or even just for creativity's sake.
This might be small parts, but small things like this can make us face a wall that can't be jumped, stagnant in the peak with nowhere else to aim, or even worse, trigger a snowball effect that crushes us down unconsciously. Back to basic, reinvent the wheel when it has to be done, shall we? (CBA)
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