Felix the Cat

How often do we use our nostalgia magic bag? It’s the one where we keep our memories and trusted well-worn tools, similar to Felix the Cat’s bag of tricks. Like Felix, when he gets in a fix, we face problems in our enterprises that we recognize and remember just how well we fixed them last time, open the bag, and pull out the tricks. Like Felix, we expect that all will be well. After all, we know that they always work.  In fact, how often did we use our bag of tricks to try to solve all kinds of problems for other people, even make more of our bags and train others on the correct use of our nostalgia bag? I have. The bag has helped many of us over and over. Lately though, something seems amiss. The old tricks seem to have lost some magic. Sometimes, using the old magic tricks on new problems actually creates newer and harder problems. What should we do?

This happens frequently. It happens with technology, resources, programs and people. It happens with our thinking and decision making processes and in the ways we ascertain success or failure. It has inherently a principle known as naïve forecasting, yesterday’s behaviors are what you should expect tomorrow, and plan accordingly. It is all we have when we don’t know any better, hence, naïve. Do we know better? Or do we want to know that our magic doesn’t really work anymore?

It wouldn’t be so bad if we did not make it so hard to change the tools in that bag. With good intent, we often set up policies and controls to ensure that a consistent way to doing things is always followed. Some of these rules are hard to break and we get called in to the principal’s office when we do. For some, living with the bag that doesn’t work makes life scary.

What about our shops? How do we deal with the changes that challenge our nostalgia, our tried and true tools, our rules and controls? Do we call the changes outliers and accept the poor consequences because they don fit our toolkits?

Do we go shopping for a new bag? Are the new tricks really magic?