Ben Holliday

Option 1, do nothing

Option 1 is always to do nothing. It’s a very popular policy choice or strategy.

Make no mistake, doing nothing is a choice, even when you default to doing nothing.

It’s important to think about what will happen if you choose to do nothing. In government there is often a failure to fully consider how broken existing policy is compared to the willingness to dismiss new and more radical alternatives. The same can be applied to your service design or business model.

Doing nothing by default is not pursuing the alternatives to a set of problems. For example, an alternative policy, business model or service blueprint.

People, organisations, and teams do nothing because they simply don’t want to risk the alternatives. They do this without thinking about the impact of maintaining what already exists.

The reality is doing nothing might cost more time, more money, and even more lives than the alternatives.

This is the cost of doing nothing, or not talking about option 1.


This blog post is also published on Medium.

This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn.