Vestiges

Unless you just started, your organization is different than it used to be. It has evolved.

The marketing you do, the decisions you make, the hurdles you have to go through probably have vestiges of the old model. Sometimes, like the little feet on the back of a whale, it's easy to ignore the vestiges. Other times, it's entirely possibly that they prevent you from achieving your goals.

Example: years ago, Prodigy, the original big online service, reflected its origins from Sears, CBS and IBM when they unveiled chat and discussion boards. Every single message posted was read by a censor before it went online. At one point, they had literally hundreds of full time editors sitting in an office tower outside of NY, painstakingly reading every single post.

Example: the production values of an HD TV show are lost in the YouTube environment, yet plenty of studios and advertisers are having trouble giving up the staffing and hierarchy that served them so well in the other medium. So the vestiges remain, slowing down the entire process (and making it a lot more expensive.) 25 people to film a three minute clip is just silly, but it makes sense if you look back at how they got there.

Example: local banks with limited hours were the norm just a few years ago. The move to online hasn't changed the way they all see the world... it's a skeleton staff at night, because that's the way it always was.

If you're working hard to work around a vestige, maybe it makes sense to work just as hard to get rid of it all together.