When familiar ideas return as the next big thing

After more than twenty years in the jargon industry, I sometimes sit through a presentation or training where a supposedly new way of working starts to feel familiar. I listen a little longer, look at the diagrams, and wonder whether I’ve misunderstood something. Weren’t we doing some version of this a few years ago? The name is different, the circles have become overlapping hexagons, and there is now a certification involved. Still, I am fairly certain we have met before.

I usually try to stay with that feeling long enough to understand it. Perhaps this approach improves on something we tried or explains it in a way that makes more sense. It may address a problem the earlier version could not. Those are all reasons to keep listening, but sometimes training is scheduled before we have worked out the difference. The team is already moving its plans into new templates and formats. Apparently, this is what the work looks like now, and our questions will have to fit around the implementation.

That space between hearing about an idea and being expected to use it has followed me through this series. In the first two posts, I wrote about the Flexicon, our household name for the professional language that can make work harder to understand and affect who we listen to. When another approach arrives, we face those questions yet again, this time with the memory of the last attempt. People are being asked to learn something new while they may still be wondering what happened to the thing they were learning before and then the confusion sets in.

I understand why people want to try again. When progress has been slow and a process has become a source of frustration, a different approach can offer hope. A clear explanation and a few encouraging examples might help us see a possibility we missed. The team wants the work to go better, and leadership wants to see movement. Adopting something gives everyone a direction, although finding out whether it addresses the problem takes much longer than simply announcing it.

Imagine a team struggling to keep track of requests. It starts with a spreadsheet, then moves to a project management platform because the spreadsheet has become difficult to maintain. Staff attend training, transfer information, and gradually learn to use the platform together. While they are still making adjustments, a new planning method arrives with different categories and reporting requirements. The requests keep coming, but now the people answering them must work out where everything belongs again. They also need to know whether the guidance they wrote last month still applies.

Watching that unfold, I would want to know what we learned about the original difficulty. Were requests getting lost because the tool could not support the work, or because nobody had agreed who would update it? Did the team need a different way to plan, or someone to decide which requests mattered most? A new platform might help, but we need to understand what we are asking it to do. Otherwise, we can carry an unresolved problem from one system to the next and become very experienced at moving it.

The appeal of these approaches is part of what Eric Abrahamson examined in his 1996 paper on management fashion. He explored how consultants, management writers, business schools, and others shape our beliefs about which methods represent progress. He also recognized that people seek new methods because they have real problems to solve. A method can become fashionable and still be useful, but its popularity tells us little about how well it will serve the team trying to manage those requests.

Recognizing an old idea is not a reason to dismiss it, either. Someone may have found a better way to teach it or made it accessible to more people. They may have changed a part that previously caused difficulty. I have no objection to meeting an idea again if we have more to learn from each other. I would just like the introduction to include what has changed and some curiosity about what we already know.

That is where the person saying, “We tried this before,” could be particularly helpful. I know how that comment can land when everyone else is excited. It can sound as though someone has rejected the proposal before giving it a chance, and sometimes that may be what is happening. But asking what they remember could open a conversation we need. They might know why the earlier process was introduced, where it became difficult, and what people did to make it work. They might also remember that the team was waiting for a decision when attention moved elsewhere.

Listening to that history could help us understand whether the previous approach was poorly suited to the work or never received the time, resources, and support it needed. That distinction matters when choosing what to try next. Someone who remembers the earlier effort may save us another six months of discovering why the same requests remain unanswered, even though they now have a different status label.

They may also be the person who moved the records, updated the guidance, and helped everyone learn the last system. When they hear about another approach, they have a fairly good idea of what follows the announcement. Procedures will need revising, information will need checking, and colleagues will have questions. All of that happens alongside the daily work. If the direction changes again before the team has settled into it, unfinished tasks and uncertainty come along into the next attempt.

Researchers have examined what happens when people go through change after change. In a 2011 study, Jeremy Bernerth, H. Jack Walker, and Stanley Harris studied change fatigue in a manufacturing organization that had undergone multiple changes. They found that change fatigue was associated with exhaustion. That exhaustion was also associated with feeling less committed to the organization and being more inclined to leave. The findings come from one setting, but they give us reason to look more carefully at a team’s response when another rollout receives less enthusiasm than expected.

People may still want the problem solved and see value in the proposal. They may simply wonder whether it will last long enough to justify rebuilding everything around it. Before treating that hesitation as resistance, we could explain what we learned from the last effort and what will be different this time. We could also show how their earlier work will contribute. Those are reasonable things to want to understand before agreeing to begin again.

For me, that makes the work already happening a useful place to start. Before choosing another method, we could spend time with the people using the current process. That includes asking about the workarounds that rarely appear in the official version. What helps them get through the day? Where do they still need help or have to wait for a decision? Their answers give us something to compare with the proposal as we consider what it would add, what it would replace, and what we could stop asking people to do.

From there, we could decide whether to try it on a smaller scale first and agree on what improvement would look like. If the goal is to get requests to the right person sooner, we can check whether that happens. If staff need answers without asking three colleagues, we can see whether the guidance helps them find those answers. Those details give us a way to judge the approach after the presentation is over. We might find that some parts are useful, others are unnecessary, and something we already had deserves to stay.

Looking back across these three posts, I keep returning to how much people know that never makes it into the formal explanation of their work. They know which instructions need translating, which questions remain unanswered, and what earlier efforts left worth keeping. Listening to them could change how we introduce an idea and whose advice we seek. It might also help us see that we need less of the proposed solution than we first thought.

So when an approach starts to feel familiar, I hope we can stay with that recognition for a moment. “Haven’t we met before?” might bring us back to something we abandoned too soon or help us recognize something we have improved. It could also reveal that we are about to repeat an effort without understanding why it failed. I would like to find out which before asking everyone to move their work into the hexagons.