Embracing Blind Spots to Unleash Unconventional Thinking

I love how Rita McGrath shares her frame on blind spots, seeing around corners. It's a great way to think of these types of opportunities.

In business there is always that point when something new is starting to take hold. It could be a new technology, a new service or a dramatic shift in consumer or market expectations. We can get stuck in the trap of what we are doing and how we have been doing it. This limits our ability to properly assess the situation.

It is not always a lack of ideas that leaves us caught off guard, rather inadequately addressing the problem.

This is one of the reasons I love working with younger teams.

People that are new to the workforce, new to a new company or industry see things as they are. They don't have years of experience that is guiding their thinking or altering their perceptions; they are free from the workplace biases we create and support by having to execute day in and day out.

Because of this gap in knowledge or understanding of the current systems, newer team members are riddled with blind spots. They don't know all of the ins and outs of the system, so they observe as an outsider and very often come up with approaches or solutions that experienced employees do not.

Now don't worry, you haven't missed the opportunity to make an impact this way simply because you aren't green anymore.

Stay curious longer
Ask a lot of questions
Look to other industries
Look to people from outside of your space to share their understanding of a problem
Experiment
Don't be afraid to fail

By adopting this mindset, you will immediate add more value to your team and organization and will start to see things in ways that you hadn't considered before.

Comments

The Black Swan

Maybe I think differently because I have read this? With everything going on with the CoronaVirus, it is incredible to see how people are behaving. Everyone and their cousin is talking about the Supply Chain, about being prepared, about not having enough capacity ... it's crazy. I honestly wonder if the people making all of these comments have ever actually ran any operations, if they ever had to responsibility to actually get things done. It's easy to say how prepared you can be, and what companies should have been doing, or pointing the finger saying "how could you be out of stock". The reality is, we have a lot of choice. The average grocery store for example can easily have 15,000 to 20, 000 skus that move through their stores ... think about that for a minute. That many skus, that are all cycling through the stores on some type of regular rate of sale. Or let's take something that's more in people's face at the mo...

Give your best stuff away

This is an interesting and sometimes polarizing topic. One group of people believe that the more content (ideas, conversations, posts, videos, etc) that you put out into the world, the better your return is as you are connecting with more people and getting greater exposure. Another group feels that by investing all of this energy into giving away "free stuff", takes away from what you could be doing to grow your business, give to your clients or to your employer. That giving your stuff away doesn't pay the bills, so what's really the point other than feeling good. For me personally, I'm all about giving my best stuff away for free, and what follows are really my "whys". First and foremost, I don't really prescribe to the idea that anyone really has "best stuff". That's finite and fixed and I truly don't believe this applies to people the way it can be associated to things. If you are a miner, and you m...

Growth & Success

We spend so much of our time focused on results and outcomes. Did we win? Did we lose? Was it a success or a failure? How do we measure it? Track it? Compare it? Everyone wants to "succeed" because that is what we feel is the right answer. That is what gets praise from those all around us. It makes us feel valued and safe as it makes us feel like we have earned our place (at work or within our community). Does every step forward have to have the same outcome? At what point is the growth and learning just as (or even more?) valuable than some expected outcome? Our world is changing so quickly these days, more quickly than it probably ever has in the past. We have access to so much information, to so many more people and communities, we are constantly trying to "measure up" to everything around us. We are experiential creatures. Every experience that we have contributes to our knowledge and understanding our our-self and the world we are a part of and influences the...

Search This Blog