- “Our consultant told us it was the next big thing.”
- “Our accountant made us do it to save money.”
- “Our lawyers said we had to or else we could get sued.”
- “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel on this one.”
- “IT says it would be a big mistake to do it that way.”
- “We tried that once; it doesn’t work in this kind of organization.”
It’s not that there can never be anything relevant in these statements. But very often they are used as substitutes for hard thinking — to justify taking the easy way out, and thus prematurely killing many paths of high potential.