Okay, so let me tell you about this time, something I call the ‘cookie cutters fall’ moment in my life. Wasn’t about baking, not really. It was about how things should go, you know? The plan. The template everyone uses.
The Setup
I was working on this project, years ago. Big client, lots of pressure. We had this methodology, this process, drilled into us. Step A, then Step B, then Step C. Like using cookie cutters, right? Every project shaped the same. Predictable. Safe. That’s what management loved. They gave us these thick binders, full of flowcharts and checklists. Told us, ‘Just follow the book, you can’t go wrong.’ Famous last words.
What Happened
So, we started. Ticked the boxes. Held the meetings. Generated the reports. Everything looked fine on paper. We were following the ‘cookie cutter’ perfectly. But underneath, things felt… off. The client wasn’t really engaging. The team seemed kinda robotic. We were hitting milestones, but was the actual thing we were building any good? Doubt started creeping in.
Then came the big review. We presented our ‘perfectly shaped cookie’ of a project update. And boom. It just fell apart. The client hated it. Not what they wanted at all. Said it felt generic, lifeless. Didn’t solve their real problem, just the one we’d defined using our standard templates. All those checklists? Useless. The process? A failure.
It was messy. People pointing fingers. Management scrambling. That ‘safe’ process suddenly felt like a trap we’d built for ourselves. The cookie cutters, metaphorically speaking, had shattered on the floor.
The Clean Up
Honestly? It sucked. Big time. Felt like a huge failure. But after the initial panic, something weird happened. With the ‘official’ process dead, we were kinda… free. We had to actually talk to the client. Like, really talk. Understand their weird, specific needs that didn’t fit into our neat boxes. We had to ditch the binder and just figure stuff out.
We started doing things differently:
- Sketching on whiteboards again, lots of them.
- Arguing about ideas, properly debating.
- Trying weird approaches management would have shot down before.
- Talking directly with the end-users, not just the client managers.
It was chaotic. Way off the ‘approved path’. We pulled late nights, fueled by bad coffee and a sense of ‘what have we got to lose now?’. We basically threw the broken cookie cutter pieces away and started shaping the dough by hand.
What I Learned
And you know what? It worked. We delivered something completely different from the original plan, but something the client actually loved. It wasn’t perfectly uniform. It had rough edges. But it was right for them.
That whole mess taught me something important. Those cookie-cutter approaches? They look safe, easy. Management loves them ’cause they seem controllable. But they kill creativity. They make you stop thinking, stop listening. Sometimes, you need things to fall apart. You need the cookie cutters to fall, to break, so you can remember how to actually shape something real and meaningful yourself.
Ever since then, I’m wary of anyone selling a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. Life, work, projects… they’re usually messier than that. Sometimes you just gotta get your hands dirty and make your own shapes. It’s usually better that way, even if it’s scarier at first.
