I recently heard a business leader say on a zoom call, “Guys, we have a sanity issue here.” Not a phrase I had heard before, but I love it! So I decided to investigate.
It’s defined as ‘an obvious, critical flaw in logic, code or data’. The solution is ‘a quick, focused, informal test or review’ to identify and fix errors in thinking, method, calculations or assumptions. This should make sure your processes – and expected results – are correct.
So, a rethink. You might analyse a previous decision to see if it should be changed. Maybe you have new information which means you want to completely (…or slightly) change your plan or approach. Or a project might have failed – so you want to discover why, and how you can change the approach going forward.
Examples include: a business failing to adapt, applying old strategies to a new market – maybe you stick with your old, analogue products when the world has moved on to digital. Or you refiuse to change promotion/sales tactics and keep pouring money into a marketing channel that hasn’t generated leads for ages, expecting that “one day” it’ll start working again.
A ‘sanity check’ originally came from software development eg if you have changed some code, you check that it’s working correctly, and hasn’t corrupted something else. Typically you only check/test the thing you’ve changed eg the login process. So, it’s quite a focused exercise. I am also reminded of the time that NASA discovered they were given measurements in imperial whereas they assumed they were in metric.
What happened was: the $327 million Mars Climate Orbiter mission in 1999 was lost, because the supplier Lockheed Martin provided thruster data in English units (pound-seconds) while NASA’s navigation team expected metric (newton-seconds). These are both units that measure a change in linear momentum. The mismatch meant that the probe flew too low into the Martian atmosphere, and broke up.
My point is:
…and this is my point: It’s always good to check in with yourself, or others, to make sure your plan, decision or assumptions are correct, rational, logical and feasible, before sending that email, spending that money, buying that expensive piece of kit or committing other significant resources. That’ll keep us all on track.
