When you have a good idea that turns out to deliver real value your natural instinct when the resulting initiative comes to an end should be to recycle it. Recycling is a very powerful concept in business if it is properly applied. You start with something that you know works; you’ve identified most if not all of the problems along the way and the likelihood that you can do it faster, better, cheaper is high.
When organizations try to recycle they tend to make a fatal mistake, they do not revisit the conceptual stage with a wide enough audience. An idea comes from one mind. Sometimes that mind co-operates with a few other minds to flesh out an initiative. In nine times out of ten that is as far as collaborative thinking goes. Ideas cannot be efficiently recycled, only the initiatives that flow from them can. While ideas are best stewed in a small pot, initiatives cook in the cauldron of the enterprise and tend to affect everybody. Therefore the sum total of learning that is derived from the initiative is spread far beyond the reach of the original minds that grew and incubated the idea it came from.
Before you recycle, let the implementers feed back to the idea generators at the start of the process by asking them what went wrong the time before. If you don’t ask what went wrong then very few people will ever tell you, but if you do then you are far more likely to obtain win-win results and a better process. Admitting imperfection and soliciting feedback greatly reduces the nightmare of Passive Blocking. If you have not come across PB then you can read how to recognize this scourge of industry here.
