Seth Godin has hit the nail on the head again – I do love his blog.   On this post today (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/square-one-is-underrated.html) Seth points out that going back to square one may not be as bad as we think.

From a Busy Fool perspective, when something hasbn’t worked – ie we’ve ended up in the wrong place, why do we think we’re somehow better off trying to get where we want to go by just changing course and continuing from where we are – the wrong place?  That’s like starting out to drive from New York to Chicago, making a few wrong choices on the journey, and ending up somewhere you don’t have a clue about, and just carrying on guessing.  Far better to retrace your route and start from scratch.

Of course, if you have a map, you might be able to work out a way to get to Chicago from where you are – in other words to create a whole new plan, based on the new information about where you are.  That could be the right thing to do if you’re driving across America, but that’s where this particular analogy breaks down – in a car, to get back to square one can take some time, so it’s probably worth doing the research to work out how to get to where you’re going, even from the wrong place.  In business, we can revert to where we started from straight away, and we’ve already done the research about that place – we just need to use it in a different way.

In fact, we’ve got more, and better, research – we now know what doesn’t work!