Don't ask how much will it cost? Ask how much should I invest?

How do things get funded in the organisation you work for? If you work for most organisations, a business case will be prepared and submitted to management for approval. The conversation around approval will invariably be based around cost and benefit - how much will this cost and how much will this make? This leads to some pretty well known problems. I have written about these problems before (The Problem with Projects and Outcome Based Funding) and they are pretty well known. Ask anyone involved in funding approvals and they will tell you that the process is pretty bad and things need to be done to improve it.

Organisations have tried many things - fast track funding for small initiatives, streamlined approvals processes, delegated approvals, all sorts of things, but the process remains inflexible, flawed and generally broken. I think this comes not from a flawed process but from a flawed starting assumption - that cost vs benefit is the correct way to allocate money. I think we are asking entirely the wrong question. No amount of tweaking the process will help if the process is answering the wrong question. So what is the right question? I think we should stop asking "how much will it cost" and start asking "how much should we invest".