For the last 6 months, I’ve been worried.

For the last 6 months, I’ve been worried.

I’ve been concerned that my business might be falling behind.

With everything going on with AI, the speed of change had me anxious.

I feared that one of our core services was becoming outdated.

I believed the only solution was to hire an expert in this niche area.

They would bring our departments together.

The expert would drive us forward.

However, this type of person would be expensive and hard to find.

I felt stuck and did nothing for months.

It kept me up at night.

Recently, I decided to try something different.

I pulled out a piece of paper and started by defining the problem.

How do we ensure our team…

Follows best practices?

Stays aware of new trends?

Remains open to innovation?

First, I imagined having unlimited resources.

If I had the money to hire this expert, what would that person do daily?

I wrote those tasks down.

Then, I considered the other extreme.

What if we had minimal resources and no money to hire anyone?

What could I do with what we already had?

I compared the two scenarios.

I realized we already had internal experts for 90% of what the ‘expert’ would do.

But there was one area missing.

The most critical area we lacked was formalized continuing training for our team.

Out of this exercise came a solution.

Create a center of excellence and education program.

Our team members would teach each other best practices, trends, and innovations.

In the end, I had everything I needed in front of me.

I just had to rethink how to use our resources.

If you ever feel stuck personally or professionally, try this contrasting extremes exercise.

Define your problem.

Imagine solutions with unlimited and limited resources.

Compare them.

Develop practical solutions.

To see things differently, sometimes you need to see different things.