Trying to solve new problems with old solutions

I've got maybe 4 phone chargers in various rooms in the house. My logic is that if ever I need to charge my phone, wherever I am in the house, there's pretty much always a charger within about 6 feet from where I'm standing. I can plug in, carry on doing whatever I need to do, and all is well. I never have to hunt around for a charger because there's always one at hand. It's one less thing I have to worry about. My family, unfortunately, don't share my same point of view. They'll see a charger, unplug it, and take it to whichever room they need to be in, which is all well and fine, but once they've charged their phone, the charger isn't returned to its previous spot, which means when yours truly sits down somewhere, sees his phone could do with some juice, The charger isn't there, so I'm off hunting around the house trying to find the charger. Now I'll pass other chargers to find this charger because now I'm looking for that particular charger. My aim now is not to charge the phone. It's like I'm on a crusade. I need to find that particular charger so I can put it back to where it lives and then all is right again in the world. Yeah, I know what you're thinking, and I agree with you. I'm a control freak, I get it. But I also never have a phone that's about to die because it needs charging. So, you know, there's that. So if you're looking for your phone charger because you misplaced it, the first places you look up— look for it are in the obvious places, right? Between the sofa cushions, Upstairs in the bedroom, wherever, you know, the obvious places. But what if the charger has been missing for a week or a month? Would you still check the same places? If you're anything like me, by now you would have moved on to increasingly ridiculous locations by now. In the laundry room, in the bathroom cabinet, in the dog. Or maybe you've given up and bought another one, which of course is the day before you find the one that you just lost in the first place. Yet in business, we keep looking in the same places for solutions even when we know what we're looking for isn't going to be there. We keep checking the socket beside the coffee table for a phone charger that's been missing for years. Sales are down? Let's try better marketing. 6 months later and we're still struggling? More marketing. Different marketing. New marketing team. Fire the marketing team. It's like we're stuck in some infinite loop looking for new permutations to the same basic idea. The longer a problem sticks around, the more certain we can be that using conventional wisdom isn't going to be the way to solve it. Because if conventional wisdom worked, then the problem would have been gone already. Yet we still use the same approaches and reuse the same approaches and expect a different result. You know, there's no need to spend millions on a customer satisfaction survey when everybody knows the real problem is there's nowhere nearby to park. Or there's no point being obsessed that we don't have such and such a feature when the problem is really buyers can't work out how or where to buy the thing in the first place. Often it takes an outsider to solve problems like these, you know, someone who doesn't know what they don't know. They ask questions that everybody else is too proud or too embarrassed to ask, and then they come up with a solution that everybody else thinks is completely wrong. And yet suddenly everything works. The reason is the outsider hasn't been conditioned to know which ideas are supposedly stupid. They don't know what "no" looks like. So next time you hit a brick wall and an idea comes up and makes you think, "Well, that's clearly totally ridiculous. We can't do that," it may well be exactly where you need to start looking. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com, that's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.