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When I was little I had a book about an old woman who bought a pig and had to get it over a stile to get home. I still remember the end of this book because even when I was little the fact that she didn't look at all the options of getting the pig over the stile annoyed me. It goes something like this:

The mouse began to gnaw the rope, the rope began to tie up the butcher, the butcher began to kill the ox, the ox began to drink the water, the water began to put out the fire, the fire began to burn the stick, the stick began to beat the dog, the dog began to bite the pig and the pig jumped over the stile.

Now that was a solution to her problem but my question is why didn't the butcher lift the pig over the stile? Surely this would have been quicker and had less chance of error than relying on a long chain of events to get the result she was after. There are so many option available why choose the most complicated?

Often when business processes have been in place for a long time this type of chain has developed, probably not to that extent and certainly not intentionally but processes with many steps do occur. New technologies or changes in law or other procedures have sometimes made steps redundant. These steps get modified or just stay there and a new step added further down the chain to reverse them. It takes someone to step back and look at what they are trying to achieve to determine whether there is a different more efficient method.

Next time something happens which means that a change is required to your processes ask yourself the following questions:

- What do I want out of this?

- Who uses the results of the current procedure?

- What do other people need out of it?

- Ignoring everything that I currently do what is the best way to achieve that end result?

- If I make changes to this process what else will be affected?

Once you come up with a solution, circulate the new proposal to everyone that you think could be affected by it. Ask for input. You never know what you don't know and someone may be relying on information that comes out of the current procedure that you haven't taken into account.

Remember your solution is a draft and others will come up with ways to modify it to ensure that their needs are met too. This is a good thing and is definitely to be encouraged.