Have you ever picked apples at an apple orchard? Trees burgeoning with plump, perfectly shaped apples, ripe for the picking. Growing up in California, we had such a prolific tree in the backyard of our house. During August and early September, Mom would send me out to pick the apples and gather up the strays lying on the ground. I’d haul them into the house with a bushel basket and Mom would turn most of them into applesauce. The very best specimens were sliced up, covered with dough and baked into Mom’s excellent apple pie.

Most of the apples, hanging enticingly from the branches, looked perfect. Or at least until you grabbed one and studied it more carefully. You know, one side of the apple looked great, but when you turned it over you’d find a wormhole or a deep bruise. Damaged goods.

But how many times have you taken a bite before performing your due diligence—checking it out from every angle?

When we begin implementing EOS with a company, we always ask the leaders to commit fully to the journey ahead – the journey to become their very best as a leadership team. One of the specific things that requires is to take responsibility for everything that you and your fellow leaders have created in your organization. Like a lot of things in EOS, that sounds easy – but it’s hard and very rare.

What we’re talking about is avoiding the blame game, which is so common in lean, fast-moving organizations. Most readers of this blog know the feeling well – you’re sailing along, growing and prospering, and then all of a sudden you hit the ceiling. You’re stuck or derailed by a major problem, or by hundreds of little ones. It’s frustrating and scary – and when you’re frustrated and scared your emotions can get the better of you.

Effective issue solving is a huge factor in running a successful business. Some company issues seem monumental and can stifle progress because of their perceived magnitude.

Ever have meetings where your team is stuck on a topic? Worse yet, you can feel when it’s about to happen because it’s happened so many times before.

Every entrepreneurial team experiences this during the course of growing their business. But to move forward as a business, you need to stop beating the dead horse!

At the beginning of a journey with a new client of mine, the leadership team was stuck on an issue about how to grow their service business over the coming year. Multiple members of the leadership team were passionate about different approaches, causing a seemingly endless repetitive discussion. Every time the topic came up, they started beating the dead horse again.

In the movie The Martian, Mark Watney, finding himself stranded 140 million miles from earth (and 4 years from rescue), sums up his situation like this:

"If the oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the hab breaches, I'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So, yeah. I'm &#$%!@.”