This past Memorial Day weekend my only child, my daughter, got married. In the days leading up to the wedding I tried to imagine what it might be like to escort her down the aisle. I envisioned us both dressed up as we’ve never been before with teary-eyes and racing hearts. I next tried to imagine what thoughts and feelings I would have, what exactly would be going through my head? While I found it to be incredibly powerful to do these visioning exercises, nothing could have prepared me for the actual experience; I just had to live it.
Buddhism makes heavy use of “pointing-out instructions”, descriptive processes by which a master may lead a disciple to uncover the true nature of mind. The term more casually implies that instruction can lead to experience, but is incapable of describing the experience itself. One of the primary things that changes one’s world-view is the process of having experiences, as opposed to just thinking about them. This is true of all of areas of life, including business.
The management adage of “ready, fire, aim” alludes to the value of practical experience in the world over prediction. Brian Robertson incorporates this idea into Holacracy with his emphasis on Dynamic Steering; I’ve always leveraged Nike’s brilliantly simple slogan of Just Do It. Regardless of what one calls it, the wisdom is the same and that is that nothing trumps experience. The art of good business is practicing the skills to keep moving forward and adjusting for actual experience all while staying within specific tolerances and limits that could otherwise lead you to kill or cripple your organization. Jumping off a building will certainly give you good hard data (pun intended) about the concrete below, but you won’t have much resource (life) left to put that new information to use.
When I model a business I move quickly estimating variables and using best guesses. I firmly believe the model doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be close. Why? Because the initial model isn’t meant to be a detailed simulation of the business, that will naturally come over time as more and more accurate data is integrated. The first implementation of the model should primarily be used to reveal the variables that have the greatest impact on the business.
All this can be summarized by the following advice: a ready, fire, aim style is great for moving quickly and avoiding analysis paralysis, but it requires that you also deeply understand the system of your business enough to avoid catastrophe and accidentally stepping off a cliff!
This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under management, dynamic steering, experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.