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The Dead Horse Theory
Lloyd Wolf | Professional EOS Implementer®
The Dead Horse Theory
I was recently talking with one of the leaders of an organization I met last summer. He shared with me that he and some other members of the management team felt an important change needed to be made, but the top leader of the organization wasn’t ready to make the necessary change.
This is certainly not an unusual situation. There is a tendency in all organizations, and even in our personal life, to resist change. That’s true even when we realize that what we’re doing is no longer as effective as it once was, or is completely ineffective and fails to provide any value. That discussion with the business leader reminded me of “The Dead
Horse Theory” my friend and mentor shared with me a little over a year ago. It goes something like this:
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians — passed on from generation to generation — says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Just get off. Sounds pretty simple, but it doesn’t take very long looking around and talking with people to realize that it is far from simple. Change is always hard, and just because everyone knows it needs to happen doesn’t mean it will.
The reality is that today’s organizations (businesses, non-profits, churches, educational institutions) and even us as individual people, have found a whole range of creative and far more advanced strategies to use when dealing with a dead horse, such as:
- Buying a stronger whip.
- Changing riders.
- Threatening the horse with termination.
- Appointing a committee to study the horse.
- Proclaiming, “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse.”
- Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.
- Declaring, “God told us to ride this horse.”
- Develop a training session to improve our riding ability.
- Reminding ourselves that other organizations ride this same kind of horse.
- Determining that riders who don’t stay on dead horses are lazy, lack drive, and have no ambition – then replacing them.
- Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
- Reclassifying the dead horse as “living-impaired.”
- Hiring an outside consultant to advise on how to better ride the horse.
- Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.
- Confessing boldy, “This horse is not dead, but alive!”
- Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.
- Riding the dead horse “outside the box.”
- Get the horse a new or refreshed website.
- Killing all the other horses so the dead one doesn’t stand out.
- Taking a positive outlook – pronouncing that the dead horse doesn’t have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the organization’s budget than do some other horses.
- Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
- Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position of hiring another horse.
- Name the dead horse, “paradigm shift” and keep riding it.
- Riding the dead horse “smarter, not harder.”
- Remembering all the good times you had while riding that horse.
We all have some dead horses we are riding. We need to first admit the horse is dead. We often live in denial. You can try to beat it, you can flog it, this will not change the fact – the horse is dead. So what dead horses (i.e. structure, people, processes, policies, products, services, customers) are you clinging on to in your organization?
One of the things I love about working with my clients to implement the EOS® (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®) in their organizations is the help it brings to avoiding riding a dead horse. The EOS Toolbox™, the Meeting Pulse™ (annual, quarterly, weekly) and meeting agendas, and the open and honest dialog between the leadership team members allows them to have those difficult, but very necessary, conversations – rooted in trust and HEALTHY conflict, without the fear of grudges, politics or guilt. The simple and practical tools used by companies running on EOS allows the team to know when they’ve got a wrong person in the organization, when someone is sitting in the wrong seat, when something in the organization is off-track and needs to be put back on-track, and when its time to make a change – simply put, when they need to dismount a dead horse.
If something is off-track in your organization and it feels like you’re “riding a dead horse”, ask me how implementing EOS can help you make the change(s) needed to solve the issue, as well as give you the tools to make changes that will be needed in the future as your organization grows.
Lloyd Wolf
is a Professional EOS Implementer®.
He works with business owners and senior leaders located in the Greater Pittsburgh Area and Western Pennsylvania – as a teacher, meeting facilitator and business coach – to help them implement EOS® (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®) in their organizations. Contact Lloyd
today for more information about how you can experience "Vision, Traction and Healthy" in your company using EOS.
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