This week I was involved in a conversation with someone about a financial report. We were focused on one thing but then they kept talking about different line items that led me to see an inconsistency that needed to be addressed.
The inconsistency revolved around the words in the description of the line items and the gap in the physical activity around those line items. Initially, the response I was given is that is how we’ve done it.
It triggered an emotion in me of anger when I heard those words. This report and its practices around this incosistency has been done this way for years. This brief encounter reminded me of how difficult it is to become “better” at things around us. Continual improvement is more of a challenge than we think.
The angry in me, is directed at how many times we “sleep walk” through life without constantly testing whether things continue to make sense. We fail to recognize that the practices around us that we participate in regularly were created by someone who may have missed something.
Never considering that those long standing practices may have been created out of convenience, or hurried to set up “something”, or to avoid doing more work to “get it right”.
All of this can be true as well for our own lives and our own practices. We may be doing something because its easy. Or we subconsciously want to avoid putting in the work. And we are ok with this except for when we begin to evaluate things with the lens of judging effectiveness.
While we are all thinking about what we can change in the new year, a good place to start is to begin paying attention to what we are doing now, and what we are using, to find those inconsistencies and gaps that we need to work on to make our new year’s results even better.