Buy vs Try - How 'Buying Change' Passes the Buck

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Buy vs Try - How 'Buying Change' Passes the Buck

Podcast Episode · Process Debt · 08/01/2025 · 22m

If you’ve ever sat through a “strategic reset” filled with dazzling dashboards and zero follow-through, you know the feeling: we bought something slick when what we really needed was someone to try something simple. Last week we scratched the surface on try vs. buy. It turns out there’s a lot more buried in that choice than budget—there’s culture, time horizon, and what we reward.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: buying is easy to present up. “Transformation.” “Synergies.” “Optimization.” You can wrap it in a beautiful slide and call it progress. Trying is messier. It asks someone to put on boots and gloves, sit with the work, and run experiments that might not pay off this quarter. If your horizon is 90 days, buy wins. If your horizon is 9 years, try wins by a mile.

Think about hiring. Most orgs “buy” talent after a couple hours of interviews and a vibe check, then wonder why the real impact lags. A trier, by contrast, is built over time. They learn the handoffs. They accumulate context. They ask the “dumb” questions that reveal the invisible constraint between System A and Team B. They don’t chase the word “impact”—they create it by fixing the thing that’s actually breaking flow.

I’ve seen it play out a hundred ways. My favorite flavor is the small, surgical try that puts big dollars back on the table. Years ago, orders were shipping from the wrong warehouse because a couple high-velocity SKUs weren’t in stock where they belonged. The fix wasn’t a seven-figure “supply chain control tower.” It was a report that simply listed what the West Coast DC expected to have but didn’t. Cue fewer cross-country shipments, happier customers, lower costs. Another classic: the box-fan story. Millions sunk into sensors to detect empty boxes on a line… until a frontline trier rolled over a $19 fan and literally blew the bad boxes off the belt. Elegant beats elaborate when you’re close to the work.

So how do you spot (and cultivate) triers?

• They’re relentlessly curious. A trier keeps asking “why does it work that way?” until the reason collapses or the fix appears.

• They think in systems. They won’t make their silo faster if it makes the whole organism slower. Handoffs are their playground.

• They sample widely. Triers rotate, shadow, sit with adjacent teams. Nike’s old 18-month tour-through-the-org model wasn’t just career candy; it built connective tissue that turns white space into value.

• They don’t need a new tool to make a new outcome. If software is the answer, great—but they’ll prove it with a micro-pilot before a platform.

If I ran a 200-person company, I’d formalize it: two percent “on the business” at all times. A tiny internal strike team that lands in a problem area for four weeks, learns like mad, and recommends the smallest change with the biggest system effect. Give them executive access and a modest budget for experiments. Make them publish short try logs: problem, hypothesis, what we tried, what happened, what we’ll try next. No theater—just compounding improvement.

And yes, consultants can help. The good ones behave like your triers: they interview deeply, triangulate perspectives, test on the ground, and hand you a plan you can actually run. The others? They sell opium: optimism in PowerPoint, immaculate decks that leave the real work untouched. If your vendor can’t tell you where the constraint lives, what single metric will move if the try works, and how you’ll validate in 30 days, you’re buying the wrong thing.

Here’s the litmus test for your next choice: does this path increase our ability to run more—and better—tries next month? If the answer is no, you’re not investing, you’re renting a story.

Process Debt Truth: Most process debt isn’t caused by lack of tools; it’s caused by a lack of people empowered to try small, obvious fixes where the work actually happens.