Identifying blind spots
“Everyone keeps telling me things are fine.”
One of the challenges of leading a business is that you’re standing too close to it. Things that seem obvious from the outside are hard to see when you live them every day, and the people inside the company often have reasons to tell you what you want to hear. The people at the council table have no job to protect and nothing to sell you.
You might recognize this if…
- You’re surprised by problems others saw coming.
- Feedback inside the company is mostly positive.
- You’ve held the same assumptions about your market for years.
- The same issue keeps coming back in different forms.
Questions the room might ask you
- What do you believe about your business that you haven’t tested in years?
- Who brings you bad news, and how quickly?
- What would a competitor say your weakness is?
- If you’re wrong about this, what does it cost?
What happens when you bring identifying blind spots to the room.
You put it on the table
You lay out the situation in your own words, with the numbers and history that matter. Ten or so owners give it their full attention.
Questions before advice
The room asks questions like the ones above until everyone, including you, understands the real issue. Often that’s where the breakthrough happens.
Experience, not opinions
Owners who have faced something similar share what they did and what they would do differently. No competitors sit at the table, so nobody holds back.
You make the call
The group doesn’t run your company. You decide what to do, with a lot more perspective than you walked in with.
Say it out loud
You name your next step before you leave. Next month, the room asks how it went.
A few assumptions worth testing, and the habit of asking the question you hadn’t asked yourself.
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Related conversations
Prefer to work on identifying blind spots privately instead of in a group? I also do this one-on-one (opens JeffreyRands.com in a new tab).