The cost of doing nothing

This week I have been reflecting on the cost of "doing nothing". Is doing nothing really neutral? It's a default, sure, and appealing to some, but "doing nothing" alongside its cousins, "deferring a decision until next quarter", or "busy with the work in front of me/you/us", all feel low risk because nothing visibly changes, yet each is still a decision, and each still carries a consequence.

The cost is people first

The obvious and biggest cost is people. Most industries have talented operators who can see a better way of working, and while some become advocates for change, others grow frustrated fighting processes never designed for the way work is done today and eventually they leave. When they go, a business loses more than capability, because it loses the people most likely to have improved how things are done.

What legacy systems expose you to

Technology also offers plenty of examples, and the one seldom discussed at any dinner party is information security. Legacy systems tend to stay in place long after support has ended or known vulnerabilities have surfaced, and the biggest breaches of the last decade exploited ageing technology as the way in. Demonstrating competence here means understanding the risks built into the systems a business relies on, and how that evolves as vendor priorities shift.

Then there are the costs harder to measure but equally real. The consumers, clients and partners paying for a service all expect it to improve over time, not radically, but incrementally better communication, visibility, responsiveness and outcomes year on year, and achieving that requires investment, which in turn requires decisions. None of which is to say every new idea is worth adopting, or that every piece of technology earns its place, but doing nothing is not a neutral position and carries its own costs, easier to ignore because they arrive slowly and often only become obvious in hindsight.

What this means for strata management

Strata management has always competed on the quality of its people, and rightly so. The capability of the strata manager remains central to the service delivered, and what will be worth watching is whether the firms that combine great people with great systems pull away from those continuing to offer a fork in a world of soup to their best people.