What you put in, is what you get out

The secret to creating a great meal is fairly simple - you obviously have to know how to prepare it, but the most important factor determining jaw-dropping 'amazingness'...is the quality of the ingredients that you use.

Great ingredients = great food. Or...'what you put in. is what you get out'.

This simple equation holds true for other 'individual-elements-combining-into-a- whole' activities outside of cooking too.

Personal trainers at the gym irritatingly bang on about 'what you put in. is what you get out' all the time.

If you want to develop a great marriage over time, you need to also invest quality time in building and nurturing that relationship; so says Ester Perel I'm sure.

The exact same simple correlation holds for developing a great business too.

The quality of the work, raw materials, teams and relationships obviously determines the quality of the output that the business creates.

But before all of this, the basic building block of building a great organisation...is thinking.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. - Albert Einstein

The quality of the thinking used to plan and strategise how a business creates value, is the key to the overall quality of what actually gets produced.

Poor quality thinking = an organisation that never really reaches the heights of greatness that it could...

'What you put in. is what you get out'.

Most organisations however don't stop to measure the quality of their thinking. Or even realise that good thinking is important.

The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance. - Albert Einstein

Groups of people coming together in a company form complex relationships - things like politics and power and self-interest tend to cloud and manipulate the dynamics of these internal relationships.

The level of thinking ultimately used to drive a company is as a direct result of these interconnections. The chances that the decisions made, under these loaded conditions, are in the very best long-term interests of the organisation, are slim.

What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right.  - Albert Einstein

When serious internal problems emerge, people struggle to work together, there is internal distrust and strife and getting the company to move forward is a real battle; chances are high that the base level of dominate thinking influencing everything the organisation does is not ideal.

The good news

Thankfully it is possible to change a mind.

Achieving better business outcomes from input efforts is most certainly possible.

It takes is self-awareness, a realisation of its importance and a commitment to actively working on it, but quality thinking can be achieved collectively by organisations. We have lots of personal examples of how even small shifts in ways of thinking within teams and companies have produced remarkable shifts.

Thinking is not often focused on enough in management literature.

There is a pervasive obsession with developments in technology; that tends to drown out the simple truth that machines by themselves, only do what their 'thinking' overloads tell them to do.

You can obviously clearly see that if the instructions given are poorly considered, stupidity simply gets amplified.

'What you put in. is what you get out'.