How Loose Hamstrings Can Improve Our Business.

Flexibility: it is a term that I have heard repeatedly in these last weeks from people I know in a variety of businesses and who work in countries around the world. Cross culturally and across fields, they are all talking about being more flexible in their business in order to survive the economic crisis.

I must admit, that before the economic crisis, when I heard the term flexibility, I thought first about how I wasn’t. How despite time spent stretching, or in pilates and yoga, I was still unable to touch my toes without bending my knees. I understand that more flexibility provides advantages that sheer strength does not for other athletic activities, but despite my awareness of the benefits that it could bring I remained a bit stiff and unfortunately more prone to injury.

However I was not so injury prone that I was forced to stop my activities for any significant period of time. The fact is, that I had figured out how to work around my not so bendy self, and so what if I had to bend my knees to tie my shoes, I would just wear clogs more.

Yes, this was good, I was being flexible about how to be flexible! However if I had gotten to the point where my stiffness prevented me from doing what I wanted, I would have been forced to work out the kinks.

Now more of us are recognizing the need to be flexible in our ways of working. If we have always been successful in the past by moving in our old patterns, it can be hard to stretch ourselves in different ways, but like having a flexible body, a flexible approach to work can minimize the risk damage; in this case, to our livelihood. Flexibility enables us to move in different ways, it gives us a grace to deal with unexpected challenges.

OK, so we all can probably agree that it is good to be flexible, but how can we become more flexible? How can we use this newfound pliability to resolve our challenges?

Designers are supposed to be flexible in our approach to solving problems. In less challenging times those problems may have been more focused and we soon established patterns that worked to meet those challenges. Across all fields, successful business all have worked to refine our processes, to improve it, but now we may need to perform in different ways and it can be hard to retrain ourselves

While flexibility may no longer be an optional strategy, there is good news in being pushed to consider it, as the combination of flexibility and more challenging obstacles can lead in the end to a superior solution; one that without the new and at first more restrictive parameters, may have not been as good. If we can rise to meet the new challenges we can produce even better solutions and have greater success.

For example, in architecture, if a client approaches a designer with a large amount of space for a given project it may be relatively simple to lay out a plan and move on, but if the designer were given the same client’s needs to fulfill within a smaller space, we are forced to become more creative and flexible with your solutions.

We must consider things not thought about before. Maybe it is how to use the ceiling, how to build in storage, how to have flexibility (it seems I can’t get away from that word right now) with the components used within the space. In the end, with the right approach the smaller space can function better and cost less than the larger space.

In your business how can your current obstacles stimulate you to make use of previously untapped resources and produce a better solution had those obstacles not been there? Maybe you have to be flexible in your approach to being flexible. Loose hamstrings are not the only solution to tying your shoes, maybe wearing shoes without laces is another way around the problem.

Being flexible can have you looking at today’s new challenges as opportunities to improve your service or your product. It is not an easy task, but perhaps by viewing your next obstacle as an opportunity you can survive these economic difficulties and come out more successful in the end.