Has a family member ever given you a gift you can't bear, yet can't refuse, and it simply becomes part of the decor? It might be a decanter so impractical that it's ornamental, but it has to be brought out every time they come over; or a portrait that asks fundamental questions about the nature of your relationship, yet over time you no longer register that it's there.
Operational challenges can be like this; unwanted gifts that become clutter, obstacles that are easy to rationalize. As they accumulate, they require incremental effort to navigate and leach efficiency. Yet when we approach a familiar operational challenge from inside the organization, we risk framing the challenge so narrowly that we're boxed in with too few options available. We refer to this as approaching challenges through a lens of our experience - and it can become part of the problem, rather than a means of solving for it.
Seeing a problem through the lens of our experience describes a way of seeing that includes all our knowledge of the history of the problem. All the attempts to resolve it, the failures, the frustrations; it's the voice that says, "We've tried that before and it didn't work." Returning to our furniture metaphor, it's not dissimilar to saying, "We can't move that painting. We took it down once, and my brother got upset." The lens of experience is effective at keeping you on the same track but it's less likely to help change direction. Evaluating a persistent operational challenge through a lens of expertise is vastly more effective.
Approaching a familiar challenge through a lens of expertise means stepping outside of the challenge, viewing it more objectively, and applying our knowledge to that problem. This is the secret sauce of consulting, the classic "outside-in perspective," yet it's possible to strengthen this capability within your own organization. The key is understanding how changing the structure of a problem helps to create new ways of seeing it. By carefully evaluating a problem and adjusting its constraints, experienced operators can see a familiar challenge with a broader perspective, and then bring their hard-won expertise to bear.
I worked with an insurance property repair firm whose leaders shifted their focus from a lens of experience to a lens of expertise with spectacular results. They were part of an insurer's repair vendor panel and found themselves competing across a broad range of repair categories, tackling jobs that ranged from minor fence repairs and garage doors through to major reconstructive work for insureds. Smaller jobs only required general handymen - low cost, low risk, and the pool of available contractors was broad - whereas the larger jobs required more skilled trades and more oversight - higher cost, higher risk, and a narrower pool of trades. Larger firms on the panel could absorb the occasional job that went off the rails, but this firm was small enough that even one or two jobs that went over budget hit profits hard. That was the model. Until this firm opted to re-imagine and renegotiate their panel membership.
The repair firm reimagined their business in two stages: first, they negotiated with the carrier to remain on the panel as a "small repairer." They would only accept smaller repair work but take higher volumes. This was feasible because the pool of trades was large and - given the nature of largely weather-related property damage - jobs were often geographically co-located. One trade could attend multiple sites in a day, which allowed for bundling and improved efficiency. In exchange, the repairer would offer a reduced rate because they weren't subsidizing larger jobs.
Second, they re-designed their operations from within by re-structuring their project management approach. They turned the entire model upside-down, from how they hired trades and retained them to how they would project manage each job. Each repair was broken into its discrete segments (plastering, painting, electrical, and so on) and were arranged such that the right trade attended at the right time - a virtual production line. Trades tapped in and out on their cellphone app, which gave the business visibility of their activity, plus allowed for them to estimate the time required for each job - a feedback loop that informed project, pricing, and contract-hiring forecasts.
The results were significant. The carrier ultimately integrated the model directly into its property claims flow, allowing customers to move from first notice of loss to completed repairs with a speed that hadn't previously been possible. Customer satisfaction ratings exceeded 90%. The firm had transformed itself not by responding to competitive pressure, but by isolating the fundamental conditions of their business and restructuring them to reveal entirely new ways of operating.
Your operations function may be more or less complicated than this example, but there's likely at least a handful of persistent challenges you'd love to unpick. Start by examining the assumptions and constraints that shape how you interpret the problem. Change those, and new solutions will follow.
