Ducks In A Row: Noticing the Obvious
by Miki Saxon
Many times the solutions we seek are waltzing around in full sight, but we don’t see them. Let me give you a personal example.
I started RampUp Solutions in 1997, but finding a simple way to describe what we did took several years.
In the show Gypsy there’s a song that says, “Ya gotta have a gimmick” to succeed and I doubt that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
I wanted one clear, concise term that gave insight to RampUp’s coaching approach, not a couple of paragraphs—no matter how well written.
When the light finally went on I had to laugh. The term I settled on was MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and the humor comes from the fact that I’ve been talking about mindset, attitude and philosophy my whole life—even using those terms.
But formalizing it never crossed my mind, which just goes to show how blind we can be.
There’s a reason ‘you can’t see the forest for the trees’ achieved the status of an adage more than a century ago.
Some people are focused on trees, while others have the opposite problem and focus strictly on the forest—neither offers optimal performance.
In my case it didn’t matter that much, sure, it would have been easier to create the company’s marketing messages, but it didn’t cripple us.
However, if your forests are made of people then it’s critical that you see them both.
It’s only by seeing your people as both individuals and collectively as a team that you can recognize the obvious solutions you miss when you focus on just one view.
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Image credit: ZedBee|Zoë Power on flickr
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