What Do You See?
What Do You See?
“Things aren’t always as they appear.” It’s the assumption premise of mystery movies and magic tricks, but it’s also sage wisdom that has been out there and proven true across our human experience. This simple wisdom has been routinely brushed aside and ignored by the young and old, the eager and the careless over time everlasting. While the results of erroneous assumptions can range from funny to downright fateful, the majority of the time we can recover. If fortunate we can learn from our perception mistakes. The practical wisdom we gain can be chalked up to experience and “failing fast”. We can eventually come out better equipped to respond effectively to the next chaos and unclear challenge. If unfortunate, the recovery path can be lengthy.
In today’s fast paced, connected business environment faulty assumptions can create miscommunications within teams, wasted time and effort, can cost precious resources and could be the difference between winning or coming up short in a major competition. Many companies use impressive levels of information systems and tools to stay up to date and aware of processes and products. While details, data and status updates help our enterprises run smoothly (or are supposed to…), uninformed and stale assumptions regarding people, customers, markets, stakeholders, etc. can derail executives, their teams and their decisions.
Our intense fascination with what might be out there, with a good suspense story, a piece of investigative journalism or with what might solve a complex business problem is strong evidence of how innate curiosity can lead, inspire, deceive and move us to action, many times without fully knowing what we are seeing. What we find is that a strong motivation to understand and act can actually cause us to see and take shortcuts. These shortcuts often narrow our focus and cloud our vision of the best plan, the real goal and the fully required course of action.
Skillfully applied outside influence can provide a strong push to action for us, like an inspiring speech, a good sales pitch or effective marketing campaign. More often though, it’s not an inspiring talk or a clever con scheme that catches us off. Actually, savvy achievement oriented people and organizations can become so laser focused on their desired business outcomes that they fool themselves, misjudging reward values, execution risks, potential competitor moves, and their own corporate capabilities to meet a major challenge or win a deal. These events are less about being influenced from the outside and more about letting bad assumptions creep into evaluations and decision making from the inside.
Lest we dwell too much on our inherent weaknesses, there are things we can do to help limit faulty assumption problems and put us more in line with real truth. Multiple sources of information, disciplined feedback loops and personal critical thinking skills can all help individuals be better thinkers. But like a pro golfer needs a caddie, a ship captain needs an executive officer, or the lone ranger needed tonto, executives and leadership teams can benefit from skilled colleagues who understand them, are invested in their growth objectives, can offer fresh perspectives and who work for clear unbiased problem resolution.
CEVOH is committed to providing this type of experienced guidance to our clients.
If you or your team seems to always be in reaction mode, experiencing stale revenue growth and / or finding out reasons for coming up short after a competitive loss, we would invite you let us help you assess your enterprise and work on areas to improve, leading to a better grip on market and company realities and a lot less dependence on bad assumptions.
Take our free Revenue Growth Assessment here – https://cevoh.typeform.com/to/B9ILLp
Contact us:
www.cevoh.com
CEVOH management consulting specializes in helping business leaders focus on three essential drivers of Incremental Revenue Growth. These key drivers are Strategy, Intelligence and Innovation.