Is Your Past Experience, or History?

I am always intrigued by the different ways people deal with the events in their lives. Some people seem able to simply ignore the past and not let it affect them today. Most people spend too much time thinking about the past.

Everyone knows you can’t go back and change the past, so it’s best to learn from it and move on. For many people, that’s “easier said than done.”

Your personal past and business past are related, but quite different. And, yes, they each affect the other. Here’s the question I’m interested in: Do you consciously learn from your past? In other words, do you see your past as simply history, or do you examine it as experiences to learn from?

I think most people would say that the “right” answer is to treat your past as a series of opportunities to learn. But that’s not what most of us do most of the time. I think you have to choose to when learn lessons so that they become "past experiences."

Some lessons we learn automatically. These are things like, “Don’t touch the hot stove (again).” We’re not talking about these kinds of lessons.

In business, two people can learn very different lessons from the same experience. Here are a few examples:

A client doesn’t pay on time

Our technicians consistently cannot get their timecards in by 5PM Friday

Another tech finishes a job but fails to document how the problem was fixed

In each of these cases, one consultant might say, “Well, some clients just don’t pay on time.” That person sees the non-payments as historical facts, and that’s all. They have not learned any lesson beyond some clients don’t pay on time.

Another consultant will look at that situation and say, “How can we address this? Let’s find out why clients pay late. Is it difficult to pay on the first of the month? Are they going through a bad time and need a different level of service for some time? Something else?” In other words, this consultant digs into the why so they can address the situation.

If the explanation turns out to be that this client just pays everybody late, then the experience can lead to a process that makes late payments expensive or impossible. Remember: All problems in your business can be solved with processes. If it's something else, then a human-to-human conversation has to take place.

Ultimately, you only improve your business when you choose to learn from experiences. If you simply accept that your experience represents the world as it is, then there's no point in pretending you can change anything. Clients won't change just because it inconveniences you. For proof, consider every vendor you do business with. How often do you sit down and consider how convenient it is for them to do business with you?

Two absolutely unbreakable rules come into play here. First, nothing happens by itself. (Sound familiar?) These problems won't fix themselves.

Second, you can't control people, but you can control your processes. And if I'm right that you can fix all business problems with processes, than you learn from you experiences and start building practices and procedures that will make you business better in the long run.