A simple frontline idea… ignored. A six-plus month delay. Millions wasted.
What went wrong?
This scenario, which we’ll explore as the “Case of the Amber Vials” (from Chapter 2 in Ideas to Action), illustrates a common pitfall when organizations respond to urgent change and innovation challenges. Faced with pressure, uncertainty, and the need for solutions now, leaders often reach for the perceived “easy button”—defaulting to familiar methods or the latest management investment before fully assessing the landscape of possibilities.
The Story: An Expensive Detour
Imagine a large pharmaceutical company grappling with a critical issue: a life-saving oncology drug rapidly losing potency after packaging, leading to costly waste and patient supply risks. In an early team meeting, a lab technician, relying on years of direct experience, offered an intuition: the standard clear vials might be the problem. She suggested a quick, simple test using light-blocking amber vials.
Instead? A senior leader, feeling the pressure and perhaps influenced by a significant recent investment in Six Sigma training across the company, pushed the perceived “easy button”—assigning the problem to a Black Belt expert to apply the formal methodology on the problem. The simple, intuitive frontline suggestion was sidelined in favor of initiating a complex, multi-month Design of Experiments (DOE) project.
Six months and significant expense later, the DOE confirmed the technician’s initial hypothesis: amber vials would have solved the problem. The cost of taking that reflexive off-ramp? Millions lost from expired product, crucial time wasted for a life-saving drug, and undoubtedly, a frustrated team whose practical insight was initially dismissed.
The Leader’s Blind Spot: The “Easy Button” Reflex
Problem-solving dogma certainly played a role here. But the fundamental failure arguably started earlier, revealing a common leadership blind spot when facing change. Under pressure, the “easy button” was pushed—defaulting to the known, the comfortable, the recently invested-in “silver bullet” methodology (in this case Six Sigma, though today might well be Agile or application of AI technology) before thoroughly considering the alternatives.
Missing was a disciplined process for upfront assessment. Critical questions weren’t fully explored before committing to the lengthy DOE path:
- What’s our immediate goal? (Stop potency loss quickly vs. definitive root cause?).
- What are all potential avenues for action? (Simple vial test, DOE, other diagnostics).
- Where do we have resources and knowledge to act now with minimal risk? (The technician’s readily available idea).
- What are the comparative risks and rewards of each path? (Risk of brief vial test failing vs. cost/delay of an expert-led project).
This isn’t about dismissing the value of rigorous validation using methods like DOE, especially in regulated industries. Rather, the critical failure here was the automatic dismissal of, or failure to even consider, a quick, low-cost test based on direct experience before or alongside committing solely to the months-long expert study. It represented a failure to weigh the immediate, certain costs of delay against the potential risks and rapid benefits of trying the simpler solution first.
The Cost of Hitting the Easy Button
Hitting the easy button without this upfront diligence isn’t really easy; it’s often incredibly costly. As the Amber Vials case shows, it leads to wasted time and resources, delayed results, missed opportunities, and the erosion of trust when frontline employees see their practical knowledge bypassed for complex, top-down solutions. This dynamic can certainly breed the “Dogma Trap,” where the chosen method then becomes resistant to common sense.
The Alternative: Precision Planning
The Ideas-to-Action Process™ advocates for a different approach, starting with the crucial upfront work in Step 1: Align & Target. This involves the leadership discipline to pause before jumping to a solution. It requires using a structured way (like the Four Change-Levers framework described in the book) to assess the challenge, consider multiple potential paths—including simple, fast frontline experiments—and then choosing the most appropriate initial action(s).
Applying this thinking to the Amber Vials case could have easily opened the door to validating the simple frontline hypothesis through a quick test almost immediately, potentially solving the problem months earlier. The more complex DOE could then proceed if needed for deeper understanding or regulatory validation, running in parallel or as a confirmation step—critically, not as an initial roadblock to the most likely solution.
Avoiding the Reflex
The “easy button” reflex is understandable under pressure, but often leads to sub-optimal, costly outcomes. The Amber Vials story clearly shows the cost of hitting it without pausing to think through the alternatives. It doesn’t need to take a lot of time. But greater change effectiveness requires moving beyond reflex and embracing the discipline of upfront assessment—clarifying goals, understanding options, and matching the approach to the specific challenge. This precision planning prevents costly mistakes and is the first step in truly unlocking the solutions, often hiding in plain sight with your front line.
Ready to replace the “easy button” with a framework for precision planning? Pre-order your copy of Ideas to Action today to get the deep dive into this hidden root cause of change failure and the foundational beliefs and process to address it. Learn how to turn your employees from passengers into drivers of innovation and achieve breakthrough results: Preorder Ideas to Action
