"Strategy is overrated. We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things". – Herb Kelleher
Given a choice, who wouldn’t rather be right than wrong? That’s an easy question to answer. And with whom would you rather work? Someone who is usually right, no doubt. But more and more I’m finding that it isn’t so cut-and-dried. Because, while wanting to be right might be everyone’s natural tendency, I’m finding that a willingness to be wrong is the more positive attribute – and is more often correlated with success.
I’m not saying that being wrong is better – but that being open to it is a better starting point. In fact, today’s “new normal” demands it. And maintaining an old school approach that focuses on getting the answer right can be a hindrance to finding the necessary, new solutions.
One problem with focusing on getting it right is it leaves zero margin for error for even a single mis-step. This keeps the steps, as well as the lateral leaps and iteration, to a minimum. Which means you can forget about innovation, creativity and continuous improvement. To say nothing about serendipity and the creative process.
And a demand for the right answer, vs. a willingness to be wrong, drives an overwhelming risk aversion. It pushes an agenda of over-perfection, over-correction and sticking-within-the lines that ensures below-average-ness. It dampens action-taking and beta-testing and learning from experience. And forget about “fail fast, succeed faster” notions.
Needing to be right is what keeps people rigid, steadfastly and unthinkingly adhering to their views and beliefs – making it impossible to learn, stretch or grow. Being unwilling to be wrong makes you say “no”, makes you avoid new things, keeps you from experimenting. Let alone listen to others’ views, engage in debate, or change your mind, god forbid.
As Stratecution teaches, you need to understand that your work, your effectiveness, your product, and your knowledge, all improve over time. That you will be iterating according to real-world information, learning and evolution. And, that you will end up at least some distance from where you started and from where you’d thought you’d end up. Thus, you have to be open to the fact that your in-going notions aren’t exactly right. You have to be willing to be wrong.
As a leader, promoting a willingness to be wrong does lots of good things:
- Recognizes the essential truth of business – there are no “right” answers.
- Demonstrates humility.
- Shows a thirst for action and learning. You can generally gain more learning from being wrong than right.
- Drives a beta-test/agile approach that focuses on making things better.
- Shows a desire for growth.
- Demonstrates authenticity and integrity.
Being wrong isn’t fun, it isn’t enjoyable and it may make you look and feel vulnerable. But it’s time to start viewing that as a virtuous asset. Perhaps this could happen if we viewed “wrong-ness” as a more temporary assignation – “momentarily wrong”, e.g. Or, even better, if we viewed wrong as just on the way to being right. It’s “soon-to-be-right”, or “nearly right”. That could help. Or perhaps I’m wrong.
“The secret to being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.” Seth Godin
Watching the fiscal cliff negotiations over the past few months has provided us many valuable lessons. One might be, you should never give old, white men something important to do over the holidays. Another – it’s probably not a successful strategy to say “go f- yourself” to your negotiation partner. But perhaps the most potent lesson we have learned is that, to get any progress in life, you have to get outside your comfort zone. Welcome to the Discomfort Zone!
Why do I say this? Isn’t everything in life about achieving and living in comfort? Finding your comfort zone is a potent human driver. It’s where you feel most competent and able. You feel your strongest sense of belonging. Things are predictable, and you’re prepared for whatever happens. And you’re happy to stay there. But our comfort zones hold us back. Because, in the comfort zone, learning, progress, and innovation tend to stop. Change doesn’t occur. We can end up hitting all kinds of cliffs and impasses, fiscal and otherwise. We just say “no”, and stay in our bubbles.
The truth is, we are all wired to shun discomfort. It’s, well, uncomfortable. It fills us with fear – of not “knowing” things, of looking dumb or inept, of making mistakes, of failure. We’re filled with doubt. It’s the opposite of our comfort zone. And that is painful – so we avoid it.
But we need the discomfort zone – to improve, develop and challenge ourselves and do new things. But how can we get comfortable with discomfort?
Don’t panic. It’s natural to feel anxiety in the Discomfort Zone. There’s the stress of not knowing what you’re doing and the fear of the unknown. But panic causes you to freeze up – which in turn negates the possibility of learning and growth. On top of that, the unpleasantness of panic will likely cause you to want to avoid it the future. It’s easy to say, I know, but instead, try to relax and let go.
Provide support. When working in a group, it’s important to make sure your team feels safe. Develop a culture of mutual respect and support. Make sure folks feel that mistakes are expected and blame won’t be an issue. And that everyone is in it together.
Don’t think only in terms of success vs. failure. If you only view things in this binary way, you will likely avoid failure like the plague – by always staying firmly in your comfort zone. But, as I’ve stated before, failure can be a very good thing… and it’s generally the precursor to success. So face uncertainty with the passion of a scientist – knowing that all results are good, and learning comes from any experience.
Recognize that not knowing is the norm. No matter how much experience you have and how much expertise you’ve gathered, every situation is new. So, whether you realize it or not, you’re constantly confronted with ambiguity and uncertainty. So get used to it.
Get out of the bubble. Spend too much time in your comfort zone and you can lose perspective. You can start to get high on your own exhaust. That’s why it’s important to push yourself out of your own bubble every once in a while, in both small and large ways. Take a new route to work, read different magazines or websites, try to understand things from another perspective. And, above all else, question everything, especially yourself.
Be willing to fall on your face. The number one thing that keeps us from venturing out into uncomfortable places is the fear of looking stupid. Of making mistakes. Of having people laugh at us. But that’s got to be challenged. Do your best to not take yourself too seriously – it’s unlikely that we’re talking about life or death. And when others begin to laugh at you, join in – and be the loudest laugh of all.
I’m facing 2013 with a renewed passion to force myself into discomfort. It’s something I will need to practice, to consciously seek and push myself towards. But in the words of Peter McWilliams, “comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort”.
Creativity has never been more important in business than it is today. The demand for innovation and new ideas is constant. With the Industrial Economy giving way to what some pundits are calling the “Creative Economy”, companies, and the employees within them, need to change in order to survive and prosper. They need to think outside the box, right? Not so fast.
When someone says to “think outside the box”, what are they saying? They’re saying forget the rules. Ignore the past. Don’t be constrained by the realities of your situation. Think blue sky, no restraints, no bad ideas. Creative freedom.
This is, frankly, ridiculous. And a gigantic waste of time. Because blue skies, creative freedom and “outside the box” thinking is overrated. You need to think inside the box – recognizing the rules, the realities, the details and the constraints that define your situation and what success is – in order to deliver innovation and useful creativity. And, generally, the more constraints, the better.
You have to define the box. You can’t think inside or outside the box without clearly defining the box. What are the details, the realities, the prerequisites? What’s worked in the past, what hasn’t? What do you need to achieve? As Bob Sutton points out, the first step in creating anything new is knowing as much as possible about the old stuff. And don’t look at constraints or realities as bad things. Look at them as the traction for your creativity.
And the fact is that, generally, the old stuff worked for good reason – so the box is there for a reason. So, again in the words of Sutton, “straying from proven ways is rarely a creative act…; rather, it is a sign of poor training, lack of attention, incompetence, or stupidity.” After all, as Darwinism would predict, most new ideas don’t work – and most old ones (the ones that are still around, at least) tend to be successful. So stray outside the box at your peril.
Creativity demands the constraints of the box. It may seem like a paradox, but you can’t do any constructive “out of the box” thinking without a darn good box. In fact, that out of the box thinking is really inside the box – the box that, as mentioned, defines the problem and the realities and details of your needs. I’ve heard the quote “give me the freedom of a tightly defined brief” – that until you have a very tightly defined problem, you can’t effectively ideate solutions (and I’ve written on the need to define your problem first). Want an example? Try coming up with a short story right now. It’s not easy, right? Now, try coming up with a story about a policeman and a thief, who are brothers, separated at birth, who meet again later in life. Much easier this time, isn’t it? Details and constraints help.
And any creative person will tell you that too much freedom is not helpful. Take John Pierce, seminal innovator from Bell Labs. When he was first brought in, he was given free rein to pursue anything. To him, it was like being cast adrift without a compass. “Too much freedom is horrible”, he said (from Leading Blog).
Nearly all breakthrough innovations evolve from existing ideas – i.e inside the box. It’s exceptionally rare that innovation and new ideas come from a lightning bolt flash of new, out of the blue thinking. Instead, they generally come from either incremental improvement upon existing ideas, or as a combination of known elements in a new way. Creativity tends to be iterative – building off of ideas and concepts that are most assuredly already inside the box. As brilliant as innovators and creative thinkers may be, they’re only “standing on the shoulders of giants”, as Isaac Newton said, describing this iterative and additive nature of knowledge.
Old or existing ideas aren’t intrinsically dumb, outdated, and in need of being thought outside of. Just because certain boxes are old doesn’t make them worthless. Being creative requires a deep understanding, and respect for, the old ways. As I mentioned before, in order to create something new you have to know a lot about the old.
And creativity is largely about seeing old things in new ways – or combining existing things into something new. This requires knowledge of and respect for existing ideas. The key is to find a way to create a view of the box that is different from the way you currently think.
Creativity needs to be useful. No matter how creative an idea is, if it needs to be useful. As Thomas Edison said, “the value of an idea lies in using it.” To be useful, it needs to be relevant to and be additive to what is already known. Creativity without usefulness is, well, useless.
So, what do you think? Should we start championing the idea of “thinking inside the box with our teams?
Today, I have a special treat for you – today’s guest post comes from John Doyle, digital innovator, strategist and all-around brilliant dude. Enjoy!
If you’ve spent any time in the ad industry during the last fifteen years (since the advent of the internet), chances are good that you’ve heard the expression “media agnostic” as in, “our creative ideas are media agnostic”. Maybe you’ve even used the expression yourself. I know I have. “Media agnostic” is a well-meaning phrase meant to indicate that teams don’t approach a business challenge with any specific medium in mind. It would seem to suggest that Creatives enter a trance-like state and ideas, conjoined to the mediums in which they will work best, appear as if from a completely neutral place. Switzerland, perhaps. Or, worse yet, that a “big idea” will work across any medium. All one need do is find the “big idea” and then drop it into the mediums that make sense.
Yes, “media agnostic” is a well-meaning phrase. The problem, though, is that it’s complete bullshit. It’s bullshit in two ways, one more significant than the other:
Bullshit way #1: “Media agnostic” hardly ever is.
The first and less-significant way “media agnostic” is bullshit is that, more often than not, it’s untrue. More often than not, Creatives think in terms of Art and Copy. That’s understandable, especially when most ad agencies still center creative around an Art Director and Copywriter team. And when you think in terms of Art and Copy, the natural tendency is to think in terms of scripts and layouts—or TV and print. You’ll hear, “Once we’ve established the brand voice in TV (or print), then we will blow it out to digital (or PR, or social, or experiential, or what have you).” And that, more often than not, is how you get banners that look like print ads, or tick-the-box “digital” efforts that consist of essentially playing the same :30 spot concepted for TV on Hulu. So, regardless of where the audience may dwell, or what their goals may be, or even how much money the client has to spend, the starting place will (more often than not) be the same: Art and Copy. Hardly media agnostic, this is a “media true-believer.” The key, of course, to killing media true-believers in advertising is to kill the idea of Art Directors and Copywriters as the sole and dominant players in creative teams. True media agnostic creative teams should be equally staffed with people representing diverse practices like technology, user experience, social, experiential, mobile, analytics, behavioral and cultural science, digital, and (maybe most importantly) media. But taking on the decades-old* Art Director/Copywriter paradigm is a topic for another day…
* Yes, Bill Bernbach created this sacred pairing of Art Director and Copywriter only some 50 years ago. Unfortunately, Bernbach died in 1982. If he had lived and worked in the internet era, he certainly would’ve changed the idea of creative team yet again. Think about that.
Bullshit way #2: “Media agnostic” means boring.
When an idea can work equally well in almost any medium, it’s probably a crap idea. Yet, that’s often what people who use the phrase media agnostic aspire to communicate—that the idea will be so “big” that it can live anywhere and be just as powerful. This type of thinking creates a false foundation for the creative process from the very onset. It suggests that all one need do is find the “big idea” and the rest will take care of itself. This is the type of thinking that leads to those absurd creative reviews where you hear things like, “and here’s how the idea looks in out-of-home, and here’s how it looks in display, and here it is again in point of sale…”.
I get it. Sometimes this approach works. I mean, I think the Geico Gecko is probably on urinal pucks by now. But, ideas like the Geico Gecko rely on the old maxim of frequency and repetition. See Gecko, think Geico. It has no soul, no acknowledgement of what moves people today. And it requires a ton of money to cement into the minds of consumers.
Ok, so who does it right? Let’s look at two examples from maybe the best modern ad agency and brand, Wieden + Kennedy and Nike.
The first example is the jaw-dropping short film, Write the Future. You’ve seen it, you enjoyed it, and unless you are some of the people who helped to create it, you’re jealous of it. No matter whether you first saw this spot online or on TV, there is little doubt that Wieden and Nike approached this campaign from any other starting point other than, “let’s make a killer f’ing film.” That’s it. Was it hosted on a site? Maybe. Doesn’t matter. The medium they specifically concepted for was film. Was it a big idea? Write the Future is probably a bigger idea than any of us will have in our careers. Yet, be that as it may, you couldn’t cram the power of Write the Future into a taxi-topper or the small Captivate screen. So “big idea” doesn’t necessarily mean flexible after all.
The next example, also from Wieden and Nike, is one that really captures the power of thinking for a specific medium—the famous Chalkbot experience. Chalkbot was an idea where the medium affected the idea utterly, for without the medium the idea doesn’t work. The medium in this case was asphalt. Not just any asphalt, the streets of the Tour De France, where hundreds of cyclists, many thousands of local fans, and millions more television viewers would give witness to the user-generated messages of hope sprayed by a pneumatic robot. It’s hard to classify what exactly Chalkbot is. Is it ambient media? Or social media? Or experiential? One thing is certain, it’s a huge idea—maybe one of the biggest in advertising, responsible for winning a Cannes Cyber Lion. But as big as it was, Chalkbot doesn’t work in print.
So, let’s do away with media agnosticism and get specific. Media specific is the way to leverage audience behavior, client dollars, and the power that mediums contribute to the idea to create something big. Big enough to work in select media.
No matter where you look, you will find hundreds of pundits, management consultants, business gurus and organizational experts all singing the praise of efficiency. Efficiency will lead to greater business productivity; it helps you trump your competition; it optimizes margins. Increasing your efficiency reduces waste and puts your resources to work delivering on your goals. It gives you more, for less. Efficiency is worshipped – it’s become the end-all and be-all.
But here’s the problem – efficiency is not an end, in and of itself. Because efficiency doesn’t solve problems, efficiency doesn’t generate creative ideas or innovations, efficiency doesn’t create passion. And efficiency can’t be rallied around. In fact, efficiency doesn’t serve your business purpose; it’s only one tool to help enable it.
Well, I’m here to tell you that you can have too much efficiency. In-efficiency is not always wasteful. In fact, there are lots of reasons that the obsession with efficiency can be counter-productive.
You can miss the opportunity of seeing things in a new way. By definition, efficiency is all about routinizing processes, simplifying and making behaviors predictable and repeatable. You work to find the most efficient route, and do it the same way each time. But this can get, well, routine. And predictable. And boring. Just like on your commute, every now and then you need to take the long way home – and see a new view and a fresh perspective. In fact, the best views tend to be off the beaten path.
And that’s just it – if you’re busy making behaviors the same each time, you have a hard time being open to innovation and new approaches. You get stuck in patterns. And you can get restricted by the process and the time you’ve allotted for each step. So a super-efficient structure can become an innovation-inhibitor.
You may stop focusing on what really matters – doing great work. When the focus becomes efficiency, the work itself can become secondary. It becomes less important how great the work is than that it’s done, quickly. An extra bit of time to re-think, edit, round out or build upon your thinking? Nope, not allowed. It’s a “get it done and move on” mind-set.
But ideas and creativity don’t always work on a schedule. Sometimes, you simply need to walk off the pre-determined course and put on some additional mileage. Efficiency won’t allow it, but great work demands it, sometimes.
Your focus is overly internal. One thing about focusing on efficiency – you spend much of your time with your head down, focusing on your own work. This helps you keep track of who is doing what, for how long, etc. But it doesn’t do a lot for your inspiration. Instead of keeping your head down at all times, lift it up and spend some time looking outside of your work and business. Go out for lunch, meet with new colleagues and partners, take a walk. And read lots about your industry, as well as outside of it, for inspiration.
Efficiency lacks emotion. Efficiency is logical. “We accomplished this much work in this much time.” “We can cut steps in the process here.” “The schedule can be compressed in this fashion.” But most great work is emotional. And efficiency doesn’t always work perfectly with emotional/non-rational output.
And I defy you to show me examples of when your team waxed poetically about how jazzed they were from the efficiency they drove. What gets them passionate is the power of ideas. CFOs and CEOs may measure and crave efficiency – but even they respond greater to ideas and growth.
Efficiency is frictionless – but friction causes sparks. A core idea behind efficiency is reducing friction – in order to gain speed. Speed equates with getting more done in less time. So organizations aim to shave processes down and remove all the edges and friction. But, when you shave off all the edges of something, you end up with something that, well, has no edge. So things can get a little bland. Sometimes you need some friction to generate creative sparks.
Another thing that friction can do is slow us down. Which is why most efforts towards efficiency are about eliminating friction and waste. But there can be a limit to how frictionless we should be, as Barry Schwartz wrote in the NY Times article called “Economics Made Easy: Think Friction”. A little bit of friction can slow us down enough to make better decisions. The recent housing/credit crisis may have been caused by too much efficiency. A little bit of friction might have been a very good thing.
And while the world is moving faster and faster, as I said in a post in April, it’s never been more important to SLOW DOWN. Slowing down can provide clarity, fosters a different kind of thinking that is more deliberate and methodical, and keeps us from knee-jerk responses. Sometimes you just have to take it slow.
So all you mono-maniacal efficiency-seekers beware – you can have too much of a good thing. So, instead, look for opportunities or reasons to be in-efficient. You’ll be glad you did.
What do you think?
Last week I wrote that there are no “right” answers – that, because most issues are complex, multi-faceted and dynamic, the dialectic of “right vs. wrong” is inappropriate. You have to make decisions based on better vs. worse instead. If this is true, then it suggests that we better be comfortable with ambiguity. Because everything has lots of shades of grey (my apologies to those who thought this article was going to be about a different “Shades of Grey”).
There are lots of reasons for the ambiguity surrounding seemingly everything these days. We’re living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Macro-economic conditions are pressurized and in constant threat of up-ending our economy (in fact, some economists are calling this post-recessionary period “The Great Ambiguity”). The political dynamics of our time have never been more polarized. Business is in constant evolution/revolution, with long-standing companies and categories being fundamentally turned upside down and new, billion dollar businesses being invented daily. Nearly everything that used to be held as a given seems now to be under question and changing hourly.
But all is not lost. Good leaders can get comfortable with ambiguity, and even use it to drive better ideas, work and success. Understanding that you can never have all the answers is the first step. Recognizing that things change, no matter how well you set your strategy and plan, also is important. And knowing that life is messy and that you can’t avoid a bumpy ride will help.
But what can you do when faced with those shades of grey? How can you avoid being paralyzed by the lack of a “right” answer?
Bring clarity to the problem. In almost all situations, there is no one answer, no silver-bullet solution. But you will help yourself immeasurably by spending time clearly identifying and understanding the problem. As I’ve written before, defining the problem you are solving goes a long way towards solving
So spend as much time and focus as you can on understanding. Know as much about the underlying factors, the root causes, the business below the business. Keep digging, until the amount of knowledge-return is less than the effort of digging. Then start solving.
Don’t fear failure. And don’t fear fear, either. Fear is one of the great de-stabilizers. And it’s a key factor that causes people to be uncomfortable with ambiguity. When you aren’t sure what the “right” thing to do is, you become concerned you will do the “wrong” thing – and fail. Instead, do your best to embrace the possibility of failure. And remember that you can never have it all figured out.
Because you can only fail by trying to do something. Just remember to learn from your mistakes, make incremental improvements, and formulate a plan for next time.
Measure and learn. Another thing you’ll need to do in order to deal with ambiguity is have a maniacal demand to measure and learn from your actions. Since you can’t be sure whether your in-going assumptions are “right”, you need to ensure you have put in place the right analytics to help you find out. And be prepared to act on whatever you learn. Because measuring without response is a waste of time.
Trust yourself and your team. As hard as it may seem at the moment, you need to have self confidence and trust in your colleagues to deal with all that lack of surety. With the proper belief in yourself and team, you can be confident you’ll be able to figure it out as you go along. In the words of Ray Bradbury, “you’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.” Having confidence in your ability to build those wings before you hit bottom will be very helpful.
Use the tension to produce ideas. The uncertainty and ambiguity you feel can cause tension. Rather than letting that tension cause paralysis and dissension, instead enable the tension to lead to ideas and innovation. Solicit input from others, especially those outside your immediate group. Brainstorm and bounce thoughts off each other. Take some logic and lateral leaps. And don’t expect the “right” answer to emerge from this ideation. Just look for something good and productive. And start building.
Do you think you can deal with ambiguity? How do you do it?
As human beings, we are instilled, very early on, with the concept of right and wrong. “Don’t do this”, “no, that’s wrong”, “this is the right answer”. And we carry that concept forward into everything we do. We forever are seeking the simplicity of that duality – do the right things, avoid the wrong ones. This approach, in general terms, can be very helpful for our well-being and success. It’s right to eat healthy. It’s wrong to spend all your money on lottery tickets. It’s right to take showers. It’s wrong to throw gasoline on a fire. And ethical rights and wrongs keep society working relatively harmoniously.
But when it comes to more complex issues, like, specifically, business problems, I believe we over-use the concept of right vs. wrong – by expecting to find the right answer when there are really only shades of gray. Aiming for the “right” solution to problems like these is not the “right” approach. Instead, my recommendation is to aim for good – and then build like hell towards great.
Why do I say this?
Using the binary “right” or “wrong” causes you to find fault with everything. If you’re seeking the surety of choosing what is “right”, then you naturally will be focused on what’s wrongwith ideas, first. Your mind will search for why ideas won’t work, where they fall down, what’s incomplete or errant about them – instead of focusing on what is good and beginning to build. You’ll be amazed at how many good ideas (and good team members) this mind-set will burn through. Because, while you’re busy looking only for the “right” answer, you’ll speed past lots of very good ones along the way.
And the fact is, everything has things that are wrong with it. There are no perfect ideas, plans, solutions. There are only good ones – that then need to be made real, built upon and “stratecuted” for the real world. Because, let’s not forget, that we’re still talking about a strategy, a plan, an idea – it’s just a hypothesis at this point.
You’ll naturally discount any ideas or answers you come up with quickly. If you are looking for the right answer, you’ll likely believe that it can only be found and developed after lots of wrong ones are purged from your mind. You will devalue anything you came up with quickly as too obvious, too hasty, too light-weight. But this is often far from the case. Many creative thinkers believe their first ideas are best. And coming up with a good idea fast gives you more time to build it and make it even better.
Sometimes it’s more important to do something than nothing. One thing about waiting around for the “right” answer to your problem – during that time, you are doing nothing. I have been on teams that spent enormous effort to over-confirm and over-perfect a plan or an idea through excessive testing, vetting and layered approvals to make sure it was right. But, as General Patton said,“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week”. Your problem is almost surely addressed better by starting to attack it with a good idea and gaining momentum and learning in the real world. As I’ve written about before, great solutions generally take some time to develop and nurture in the real world.
The safety of “right” is a false one. Here’s another thing to consider – what is “right” in theory can end up “wrong” in real life. As I mentioned, our ideas and plans and solutions are hypothetical – until we make them real. Lots of things impact the in-market realization of these plans. This includes some things in your control, like the execution and real-world activation of your ideas, as well as even more things outside of your control, like the activities of your competitors, the European economy or the unseasonable weather. So, as sure you are of the right-ness of your plans, you can’t really be sure.
What do you guys think? Are there really “right” ideas? Am I “wrong”? Have I beaten this to death yet?
The only constant is change. Heraclitus
No matter how much you learn, experience and know, there’s only one thing you can be truly certain of. Things change. It’s the one thing that’s always true, the one constant in a dynamic world. No matter how smart you are, how far you’ve traveled, how much you’ve figured out – you can’t stand still. And you can’t expect the world to do so, either.
Things are changing at an even greater and greater pace today. What we used to hold true is now passé, deeply regarded facts and beliefs are history, business models disrupted daily.
And the real world has gotten more complex. Technology, speed, fragmentation all make doing things both easier and more difficult at the same time. Collaboration and co-opetition complicating how you work and who you work with. And the rise of data and analytics driving the need for nimbleness and reactivity.
But I’m here to tell you that evolution and iteration were always part of doing great work. And it’s time to recognize it, embrace it and dive in. Stratecution, anyone?
Reality doesn’t do what you want it to do. Here is the main reason I regard execution as highly as strategy – because strategy is developed in the boardroom, but execution is designed for the real world. No matter how brilliant your strategy, it’s just a hypothesis. A smart framework for doing. And having a great strategy still can’t bend reality to its will. So you have to be prepared for learning and evolving your plan and your actions to fit the realities you face. Because the real world has lots of factors you can only guess about – or can’t possibly plan for at all. What the competition is doing, what’s happening with the economy, what the weather might do to sales. These are all factors that will evolve your execution, strategy notwithstanding.
The real world is just plain messy. You can start any project with a simple strategic model, but by the time you’re through executing it, it’s likely to be quite different than you’d imagined. And no matter how well you think you know your target audience, they are much more complex than “Women 18-49”, or “Lapsed Users”. You’ll no doubt learn as you go that your plan will require more layers to your efforts and communications for different constituents, more phases of follow-ups you never expected, and additional types of contacts than you’d prepared. Efficiency be damned.
Learning and adaptation are key. Data is driving an even greater need for evolution. We can now know more about the impact of our efforts, as we implement them. While we used to wait for an after-the-fact evaluation of success or failure via some rear-view mirror research – we now are taking the pulse of our performance, day in and day out. So you better believe you’re going to have to iterate and evolve, based on learning. Standing pat on your in-going activities in a set-it-and-forget-it way, despite on-the-ground learning, is not only out-dated. It’s a plan for failure.
This is why live testing of approaches and ideas is so hugely important – because you just can’t know what works in advance. So take some different approaches to market and learn what works best, in real conditions with real people in real life.
Real time is the norm. Speaking of real, real time is now the norm. Consumers expect the world to be at their beck and call. Data at their fingertips, entertainment on every screen when they want it, customer service 24/7. So you better be prepared to deliver. Don’t enter into Social Media or start tweeting in the way you used to create a TV commercial – with a one-off and a wait-and-see. Be available, be adaptive, be real time.
Collaboration makes ideas better. Working together is the norm, nowadays. More people are involved in bringing communications programs to life than ever imagined. The traditional “creative team” now includes lots more people, proving creativity does truly come from anywhere – media agencies, technologists, content partners, etc. So be prepared to collaborate and iterate. Where an idea starts doesn’t necessarily indicate where it will end up. Which is a good thing – as long as you are open to evolution. Collaboration makes ideas better, so get ready or get out of the way.
I think it’s about time people understood that everything is iterative. The new world and the new way of working demand it. So don’t resist it – evolution and change are good. For ideas and for you.
What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts.
Nancy Willard once said, “Questions are more important than answers” (I’ve also written on the importance of asking questions). And, as Seth Godin points out, the most important question you can ask is “Why?” “Why?” is the mother of all questions. And it isn’t asked nearly enough.
“Why” is important for so many reasons. It’s a clarifier, a disrupter, a teacher, and an excavator. Asking “why?” means you’re plugged in, interested, and digging deeper. And it helps you on the back-end, by focusing and defining success.
7 ways “Why?” helps you:
We hear kids asking “why?” all the time. But, over time, we begin to stop asking it. And we stop gaining from the power of the question.
Let me know your thoughts and questions? Including why I wrote this…
Imagine the following scenario, if you will: A record executive comes up to Mick Jagger some years ago and says “You’ve got a good, rough, blues voice and you know how to get the crowd excited with your swagger. But you need to work on your enunciation, and the quality of your voice can get a bit pitchy, so please work on that.” I know, it’s pretty ridiculous. But that’s almost exactly what lots of company leaders do to talent on their teams.
It happens all the time – you hear things like, “Mike is highly strategic, very insightful and is great at building off of ideas… but he needs to get better at these other things”. Or worse, “… he doesn’t fit the culture”. Time and time again, I hear about people being told to be something else, to be more like the current management style and culture, instead of finding ways to leverage what they’re particularly good at.
For example, I knew a senior Strategic Planner who was exceptionally quick at distilling marketing and consumer dynamics and data, great at ideating, and extremely deep in experience in almost all categories you could imagine. A perfect combination of talents for a senior Strategic Planner. Except he was expected to run a department and align with the leaders’ office politics, which he was not so good at. So, after briefly trying to make him good at what he wasn’t, he was pushed out. Despite the fact that his strategic acumen and instincts could have been a great value on numerous occasions.
Naturally, there are lots critical skills that are critical for anyone to develop. Like learning to collaborate, being respectful, getting your work done on time, delivering on your projects, watching costs and efficiency. And if you’re managing people, you need to learn how to do that successfully and productively. But when you find people particularly strong at something that really helps your company deliver on its core business, isn’t the best scenario to find ways to take advantage of them?
Why on earth push an incredibly creative person to be good at paperwork? Or tell the highly analytical person they need to learn how to lead a lateral-thinking exercise? That person who is bringing in tons of new business – let them continue doing that. But some companies seem to have an irrational desire to make everyone the same as everyone else.
Instead of doing that, do this:
Companies need generalists who can make the whole organization run, and can see the whole playing field and know how to tap the right resources at the right time. But the quirky “lemon” who is discounted because he doesn’t also make orange-ade? Think about ways that his lemon-ness might help the company succeed.
What do you guys think?
