You can't hitch a rooster to a wagon...

...well you can but it would have to be a little wagon and it would be more as a joke than to get any useful work done! A horse and a rooster are excellent animals in and of themselves, but you wouldn't want a horse in a henhouse or to try and saddle up a rooster, it would just be silly.

Yet we sometimes do the same thing when we come across new ideas. In one organisation I know, the flavour of the month is Behavioral Insights. Now this is a useful concept in itself and has the potential to work well where it is applicable.

But in this organisation, it has become an end in itself and without really understanding its scope of application, one of the managers is trying to apply it where it doesn't really work. It isn't that the manager has seen an opportunity to exploit, but rather that they have fallen in love with a new tool which they don't really understand and they are itching to use it. Of course, they can't point to how it can be used, but that isn't their problem: they have delegated it to someone else who is tearing their hair out trying to see its relevance.

In an episode of the Canadian sitcom "Corner Gas", Brent and his father are having an argument about whether Brent should rent videos out of the gas station. Brent appeals to his mother for support "Ma, Dad doesn't know what he's talking about" and his father responds "I don't want to know what I'm talking about". Sometimes this is what happens in management: a manager is so keen to apply an idea that they don't take the time to "know what they are talking about."

And that is the take home: without looking at and understanding the full context of a technique or process, you can generate a lot of wasteful action, but not much progress. Understand first then investigate where or if it can be applied.

Otherwise, you will end up with a rooster trying to pull a very big wagon, and unless the rooster is Foghorn Leghorn, getting nowhere.