We all do it. You do it. Your neighbor does it. Your co-workers do it. Your family does it. Your consultants do it. You even learned it in school from your teacher. PTO - Polishing the Outside. We've been doing it for decades. All over the world. You can rightly call it a pandemic.

With the advent of ITIL and other best practice frameworks, we have spent three decades of learning to design our organizations and our daily routines from the practices of others. A great market for suppliers, with only one taste: best practices. Nobody starts on the inside anymore. PTO.

With the arrival of the Enterprise Architecture models, we have learned since the seventies to think mainly in terms of ever-varying aspects, not in terms of sustainable structure. And then varying combinations of aspects, which were in the casual interest of the author of that model, think Zachman or TOGAF. Coming up with a new EA model was then no longer difficult: you just came up with a few other aspects, and - hey - another new model. PTO.

With the advent of business reference architectures, we also learned to take the practice of an industry as our starting point. With the arrival of a new law, a municipality will have to revise all its practices. PTO.

With the advent of improvement techniques such as SixSigma and Lean, we have learned to improve the efficiency of our work - thinking from practice. PTO.

And if we have to write a report or draw up a service agreement, then we will comment, add to, adjust, etc. on the first draft, over and over again until it contains, in the eyes of everyone, everything that is needed... and it has become an unreadable, thick document. PTO. The Dutch government even had to start a national project ('Directly Clear') to make the citizens understand what the civil servant actually wanted to say.

So it is a pandemic. One that most people are completely unaware of. You don't get visibly ill from it after all... The disease even has symptoms that are pleasant for many: you often earn a good living with it. PTO.

So why is it still a disease? Because all that Polishing The Outside doesn't really contribute to the theme that everyone is talking about nowadays: value creation. We are busy with all kinds of things, but it contributes very little net to the intended goal.

Is there a vaccine? Yes there is. And you can even brew it in your own kitchen. Just don't polish on the outside, but start at.... The Beginning. The recipe? Taking simple, logical starting points, and then sticking to them consistently so you get efficient and consistent results. It's called 'architecture'. It's based on explicit principles and building blocks. And you can apply it to any management domain. Give it a try. It takes some getting used to, but then you have something.

[Translated from my original column in Dutch, in ICT Magazine]