What We Advance of Ourselves

"To get better, I must invest more."

How many times have we heard this sentence? How many times have we said it ourselves?

Work more to earn more. Speed up to catch up. Multiply initiatives to get out of a difficulty. Mobilise new resources to make up for those that are missing.

The logic seems obvious.

A question may then arise:

Is this really the only way out?

When the solution feeds the problem

Over my professional life, in banking, investment and then entrepreneurship, I observed how certain companies could become prisoners of their own way of operating.

Let us take a fairly common example.

A company receives orders. To fulfil them, it must buy raw materials, pay suppliers, mobilise staff or develop prototypes.

So it commits resources today in order to receive money tomorrow.

So far, nothing unusual. It is the daily reality of many companies.

But when the gap between expenses and receipts becomes too large, growth can produce a paradoxical result.

The more orders the company receives, the more cash it must tie up.

And when it tries to make up for this imbalance by multiplying orders, it may end up increasing its cash needs even further.

A vicious circle can then set in. The way of operating freezes, even though reality has changed. Yesterday's answers are no longer necessarily suited to today's environment.

The reflex is often to look for solutions outside: more volume, a new credit line, an investor or a partner able to bring additional means.

These solutions can be relevant.

But they do not necessarily answer a prior question:

What if the problem also lay in the way the activity is organised?

Increasing a system's resources without questioning how it works can sometimes amount to pouring more water into a leaking container.

I took the example of the company, but it is only a vehicle. A family, an association, an institution, a country: everywhere, what crystallises is our ways of thinking and operating.

What we commit in advance

It is not only money that we commit in advance.

We also advance time, attention, energy, availability, sometimes our personal security.

We invest today in a result we hope to obtain tomorrow.

This is perfectly natural. No project can exist without a share of commitment, risk-taking and trust in the future.

But from what point does this commitment become a habit? A form of permanent pre-financing?

It happens when we must constantly give more to keep the system afloat, when we ourselves compensate for its imbalances, when our ability to continue depends on a future result that is never entirely in our hands.

In a company, this can translate into fragile cash flow.

In an organisation, into a few people constantly carrying the responsibilities of others.

In our personal lives, into this conviction that we must always make one more effort for things to finally work out.

We can thus become the main resource of a way of operating that exhausts us.

And, without necessarily being aware of it, help perpetuate it.

I also recognise some of these mechanisms in my own story.

I am beginning to see them better, without claiming to have identified them all.

And sometimes, seeing them is already enough to stop reproducing them in exactly the same way.

"But we've always done it this way"

This phrase has always intrigued me.

"That's how our profession works."

"Clients demand these conditions."

"In our sector, we have no choice."

"We have to do like everyone else."

Sometimes, these statements describe real constraints.

But sometimes, they simply describe habits that have become so familiar that we no longer think of questioning them.

What is "our profession", concretely? Among what makes it up, some elements are real constraints. Others are habits that no one has looked at for a long time.

And these habits are not only individual. They can be shared by a whole sector, a profession, an ecosystem, to the point of becoming implicit rules that no one questions anymore.

Yet a habit is not a law of nature.

What worked yesterday can become problematic today.

Markets evolve, human behaviours change, unforeseen events multiply.

And yet we often keep applying the same answers, the same "recipes from the past", simply increasing their intensity in the present.

More work. More financing. More control. More organisation.

And it is heavy.

As if the problem came above all from a lack of external means, and rarely from the way we use them.

And if we wait for a whole ecosystem to change before daring to modify our own practices, we risk waiting a long time.