Over the past few years, I’ve noticed the highway people clearing out the underbrush near the exits on the highways around my house.

I always thought it looked nice when they cleared out the underbrush. It gives the area a nice, tidy look.

Today I came to understand why they’ve been doing it. Turns out the highway people aren’t that concerned with aesthetics.

It turns out that much of what they’ve been doing is intended to deter homeless people from camping out in the bushes near the exits. It’s often a wooded, unused area that’s a convenient place to live if you’re making your living by standing at the exit with a sign asking for help.

Politics and sympathy aside (we could spend days debating the plight of the homeless), it’s an interesting strategy for managing a problem. The government has eliminated the conditions that encouraged the homeless to frequent the exits seeking money. They cleared the brush and effectively cleared out the problem. They attacked the conditions and environment that facilitated the situation.

I have to admire the governmental approach, even if I don’t entirely approve of the objective. The government is getting the results it’s seeking.

Now let’s apply this approach to your practice.

Do you have an environment that allows problems to fester? Do you have conditions that result in issues recurring in your practice?

For instance, do you have people sitting in such proximity to one another that you encourage personality clashes? Could you separate them and reduce the issues?

Do you have such a mess in the file room that things get lost more often than they should? Do you have technology that’s so old that you spend a fortune on service calls? Is that happening because you and your partners can’t agree on how to work together? Is the business structure ineffective when it comes to solving problems?

Do you skimp on legal research capabilities so that your failed research results in lost cases? Do you have an open door policy keeping you from focusing, resulting in a failure to meet deadlines? What are the conditions that allow these issues to persist? Where is all that coming from? Is it about your insecurity? Is it about a partnership that should have been abandoned years ago? Is it about an owner-heavy business with too many leaders and not enough followers?

You’ve got a system perfectly designed to deliver the results you’re getting. Change the system, and you’ll change the results. Your environment is a key element of that system. What could you change in the environment that would change the outcome of your system? Move backward from the bad outcome and study the conditions that allow the existence of the underlying issues. Find the root of the problem and attack it there. Take a look at the environment and see what you can do to change your outcomes.

Is it time for you to clear out some dead underbrush? Time to cut down some weeds?

Once you figure out a way to use the brush-clearing example to improve your practice, go ahead and take a few of the extra dollars you’ve earned and donate them to WIN – Women in Need so it can help homeless women and children since they can’t camp out near my house anymore.