Every idea we come up with is a version of what we already do.
The familiar answer wins
The team reaches for what worked last time, even after the customer, the market, or the tools have changed. Past success can make the current approach feel safer than alternatives and reduce the pressure to question it, so the old approach stops being questioned.
- Every option on the table looks like a variation on the current plan.
- New information gets explained using the old story.
- "That's not how we do it here" ends the discussion.
Who: the team lead and someone who joined in the last year. Ask the newcomer: "What surprised you about how we do this?" Ask the team: "What is true about our work today that wasn't true when this approach started working?" Count: on the last big decision, how many of the options considered were real departures from the current approach. You're probably looking at this pattern if every option was a variation on what already exists. Probably not if the team weighed real alternatives and chose the current approach on the evidence.
The first answer sets the frame. In that pattern, one early answer dominates a single meeting. In this pattern, the same answer wins for years.
Ask, "What is true about our work today that was not true when this approach started working?"
Have one person step out and describe how the work lands from a user's perspective.
On an important hire or decision, give one outsider a real say in whether it meets the bar.
Using ten years of data from US airline and trucking companies, plus a laboratory experiment, researchers found that companies with more past success held onto their strategies more after a big change in their industry, and then performed worse (Audia, Locke, and Smith, 2000). The underlying idea, that getting good at one way of working makes a better way less likely to be tried, comes from Levitt and March (1988). Emerging: one study, two methods.