Option 1: do nothing

Option 1 is always ‘do nothing’. It’s a very popular policy or strategy.

Make no mistake, doing nothing is a choice, even when you default to doing nothing.

Doing nothing by default is not pursuing the alternatives to a set of problems. For example, an alternative policy, business model or service blueprint.

It’s important to think about what will happen if you choose to do nothing. In government there is often a failure to fully consider how broken existing policy is compared to the willingness to dismiss new and more radical alternatives. The same can be applied to your service design or business model.

People, organisations, and teams do nothing because they simply don’t want to risk the alternatives. They do this without thinking about the impact of maintaining what already exists.

The reality is doing nothing might cost more time, more money, and even more lives than the alternatives.

This is the cost of doing nothing, or not talking about option 1.