Each day when I arrive at work, I have two options for how to enter the parking lot. The first entrance, which is a shade faster and closer, is nothing more than a narrow path through a smaller parking lot. I have to drive past the first entrance to get to the second entrance, so it takes a little longer.

Today, as I approached this decision, I noticed a car backing out of my parking lot and turning towards the front exit. Seeing this, I knew we were about to come face-to-face in the middle of that narrow path, forcing either an awkwardly tight squeeze past each other, or forcing one person to back out and wait for the other to pass. To avoid this delay, I skipped the front entrance and continued on to the second.

Sure enough, as I was turning into the second entrance of the parking lot, the other vehicle emerged from the front exit behind me. Perhaps they even saw me turning into the second entrance and thought to themselves “Ha! He’s taking the less efficient route and doesn’t know it” when actually my foresight led me to an action “more profitable” than would otherwise have been the case.

So it should be with organizational behavior in your respective business market or career industry. Use best practices to find the most efficient operation/behavior/process, but don’t become so set in your ways that you overlook market trends that cause change to be advantageous. If the other driver in my story represents competitors in the market, I prefer to let them go on assuming that I am just a poor decision maker. When I realize shifting trends faster than the competition and react to them responsibly, I maintain the competitive advantage.

Disclaimer: This metaphor does not take into account risk associated with decisions. For instance, if a garbage truck was loading the dumpster by the second entrance, blocking it entirely, and I was too distracted by the other driver to notice, the outcome would have been heavily negative, relatively speaking.